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  Critical Writing About Literature

  Erika L. Bass

  This free custom textbook includes openly-licensed and public domain works for the University of Northern Iowa course ENGLISH 2120: Critical Writing about Literature. It introduces readers to the knowledge and skills necessary to critically read, interpret, and analyze literature. The editor--Dr. Erika L. Bass--chose these readings to orient readers to important concepts and literature genres, as well as develop writing skills. While these chapters were chosen from other OER textbooks, I took care in selecting the chapters that are relevant to course objectives and will help students transfer skills from one class to the next, regardless of major. -- Provided by the publisher

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  Cornerstone: 2023-2024 [2nd edition]

  Nikki Harken, Deb Young, Sadé Barfield, and Scott Bredman

  The Cornerstone textbook is a free, custom textbook for you, published by Rod Library. It is a compilation of materials from more than six free, openly-licensed textbooks. Your Cornerstone instructors carefully selected the best of the best for your course! -- Provided by the publisher

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  Elements of Creative Writing

  Grant Tracey, Rachel Morgan, and Jeremy Schaffenberger

  This free and open access textbook introduces new writers to some basic elements of the craft of creative writing. The authors—Rachel Morgan, Jeremy Schraffenberger, and Grant Tracey—are editors of the North American Review, the oldest and one of the most well-regarded literary magazines in the United States. We’ve selected nearly all of our readings and examples from writing that has appeared in our pages over the years. Because we had a hand in publishing these pieces originally, our perspective as editors permeates this book. As such, we hope that even seasoned writers might gain insight into the aesthetics of our magazine as we analyze and discuss some reasons we think this work is so remarkable—and therefore teachable. -- Provided by the publisher

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  Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

  Jolene Zigarovich

  "Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel demonstrates that archives continually speak to the period's rising funeral and mourning culture, as well as the increasing commodification of death and mourning typically associated with nineteenth-century practices. By drawing on a variety of historical discourses-such as wills, undertaking histories, medical treatises and textbooks, anatomical studies, philosophical treatises, and religious tracts and sermons-this study contributes to a fuller understanding of the history of death in the Enlightenment and its narrative transformation. As of yet, no single study has collected copious material and literary examples of death and mourning in the period"-- Provided by publisher

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  Semillas [Seeds]: Elementary Spanish I

  Giovanni Zimotti, Rachel Klevar, Eden Jones, and Gabriela Olivares-Chat

  Semillas: Elementary Spanish I is a comprehensive introductory Spanish open-access textbook with reading, listening, speaking, and writing practice. To ensure that our textbook is diverse and inclusive we have built a team of writers who cross gender, age, and nationality. We have consulted with people whose voices represent diverse demographic segments of the Spanish-speaking world to include a plurality of pronunciations and appearances. This textbook underwent a rigorous review process that included professionals from more than ten higher education organizations in the United States.

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  Cornerstone: 2022-2023 [1st edition]

  Nikki Harken and Deb Young

  The Cornerstone textbook is a free, custom textbook for you, published by Rod Library. It is a compilation of materials from more than six free, openly-licensed textbooks. Your Cornerstone instructors carefully selected the best of the best for your course! -- Provided by the publisher

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  The Cord: A Novel

  Jim O'Loughlin

  Between Earth and outer space lies the Cord…

  In the distant future lies Station, an orbiting space station tethered by a cord to Earth, allowing people to use the space elevator to travel into low-orbit without rockets, allowing for unprecedented space exploration and tourism. Envisioned as a secure and enjoyable place to work and visit, the cord is a valuable resource—one that people are willing to fight for to gain control. Travel along with a robot repairman who uncovers a disturbing conspiracy, a teenaged girl who is caught up in a revolution, and a tour guide in space trying to reestablish a lost connection with his brother on Earth. Beginning at the end and ending at the beginning, this unfolding story told over future locales and times reveals the enigma of the cord and the secrets between the fragile ties connecting lovers, friends, and the generations who traverse the cord. -- Provided by the publisher

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  Five Hard Bites: A Collection of Hayden Fuller Mysteries

  Grant Tracey

  In these five hard-bitten tales, PI Hayden Fuller searches for a missing girl while tangling with a sex ring; mixes it up with N'oublie jamais, while dealing with a domestic abuse case; investigates his father's murder and tumbles onto a cult and a leader who wants to "dismantle the universe"; dukes it out with Nazis in Bannerville, Pop 1201, and their "triumph of redemption" featuring mechanical dragons; and stumbles through a demi-monde of underground filmmakers while busting up a sex trafficking ring. Fuller, with his fists and snub-nosed .38, unpacks a host of lies as each narrative builds to a shock ending. His is a pyrrhic journey, for in the dark, Fuller finds something more than night. -- Provided by the publisher

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  The Coolest Month

  Vince F. Gotera

  Since 2012, Vince Gotera has made the most of the month of April, writing new poems every day, in response to multiple NaPoWriMo and Poem-a-Day prompts. The Coolest Month brings together the best of those efforts, with a poem for each day of the month. The resulting collection is often funny, sometimes heartbreaking, and always an impressive display of poetic chops

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  Daily Life in the Industrial United States, 1870-1900

  Julie Husband and Jim O'Loughlin

  Not just about the rise of the factories or the emergence of the modern city, this fascinating history conveys how it felt to work the assembly line and walk the bustling urban streets. Provides an overview of the dramatic economic changes occurring in the United States during industrialization, especially in the textile, meatpacking, steel, and railroad industries. Describes a political culture marked by high participation rates in the North, active suppression of the African American vote in the South, and a youth culture that made voting an important male rite of passage. Offers primary documents that invite readers to consider contrasting positions on a variety of issues, including how white supremacists justified violence and suppression of the black vote and how African American activists spoke out to resist this. Explores a variety of educational models, including manual education, Montessori education, and single-sex education, that resonate with contemporary debates on education. -- Provided by the publisher

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  Communication and Conflict Studies: Disciplinary Connections, Research Directions

  Adrienne Lamberti

  This book explores relations between communication and conflict. How one thinks about communication is demonstrated as shaping how one approaches conflict, and vice versa. Individuals engaged in conflict transformation apply the tools and strategies of their field while communicating to widely divergent audiences. Professional communicators not only create an infinite range of documents to help ensure that work is accomplished effectively, efficiently, and safely, but also address conflicts in the workplace and in the public sphere. Thoughtfully exploring connections between communication studies and conflict studies, this collection engages with research and practice on topics including the potential of social media during revolution, the role of gender during mediation, and the importance of critical genre usage during industrial crisis. -- Provided by the publisher

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  Plague in Paradise : the Black Death in Los Angeles, 1924

  Jeffrey S. Copeland

  Families in the Mexican community of Los Angeles are getting sick. Some are dying. Has the Spanish Influenza returned as some suspect? Dr. Matthew Thompson, the most skilled diagnostician at Los Angeles County General Hospital, fears something even more deadly. When patients develop boils, their skin darkens, and they start coughing up blood, his worst fears are confirmed: Plague―the Black Death―has taken root just a few miles from the hospital and main center of commerce of the city. Some in civic government and even a few high ranking medical officials would like this outbreak kept quiet, even if the secrecy costs the lives of those presently afflicted. The reputation and future of a whole city is at stake. It is more important to protect "The Paradise of the West," as Los Angeles is now known for its healthful climate, beautiful beaches, and bountiful opportunities. What happens when a plague hits a minority group whose welfare is of little concern to government and medical leaders? Dr. Thompson, Nurse Maria McDonnell, and Fr. Medardo Brualla of Our Lady Queen of Angels Parish decide to fight for the welfare of all, but they find themselves facing much more than a medical crisis: fear, racism, and greed. Based on a true story.

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  Virginia Woolf, the War Without, the War Within: Her Final Diaries & the Diaries She Read

  Barbara Lounsberry

  In her third and final volume on Virginia Woolf’s diaries, Barbara Lounsberry reveals new insights about the courageous last years of the modernist writer’s life, from 1929 until Woolf’s suicide in 1941. Woolf turned more to her diary--and to the diaries of others--for support in these years as she engaged in inner artistic wars, including the struggle with her most difficult work, The Waves, and as the threat of fascism in the world outside culminated in World War II. During this period, the war began to bleed into Woolf’s diary entries. Woolf writes about Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin; copies down the headlines of the day; and captures how war changed her daily life. Alongside Woolf’s own entries, Lounsberry explores the diaries of 18 other writers as Woolf read them, including the diaries of Leo Tolstoy, Dorothy Wordsworth, Guy de Maupassant, Alice James, and Andre Gide. Lounsberry shows how reading diaries was both respite from Woolf’s public writing and also an inspiration for it. Tellingly, shortly before her suicide Woolf had stopped reading them completely. The outer war and Woolf's inner life collide in this dramatic conclusion to the trilogy that resoundingly demonstrates why Virginia Woolf has been called "the Shakespeare of the diary." Lounsberry's masterful study is essential reading for a complete understanding of this extraordinary writer and thinker and the development of modernist literature. -- Provided by the publisher

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  Innovative Practices in Language Teacher Education: Spanning the Spectrum from Intro- to Inter-Personal Professional Development

  Tammy S. Gregersen and Peter D. MacIntyre

  This volume addresses innovations in language teacher education, offering a diversity of personal/psychological perspectives and topics in the theory and/or practice in language teacher education. The text deals with innovations in teaching for learning, teacher autonomy, dynamic self-reflection, peace education, professionalism, action research, socio-emotional intelligence, embodiment, professional development, NeuroELT, and more. Organized in three sections, the chapters inspire readers to reflect upon what it means to grow as a teacher as they navigate the intra- to inter-personal continuum. The editors draw the main themes together and discuss them in light of an innovations framework developed by Rogers (including relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability and observability) in order to express, in concrete terms, the ways in which each idea can be considered innovative. Throughout the anthology, the reader will find specific, novel ways in which to work towards good practice in language teacher education.--From the publisher

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  Optimizing Language Learners' Nonverbal Behavior: From Tenet to Technique

  Tammy S. Gregersen and Peter D. MacIntyre

  This book highlights the pivotal role that nonverbal behavior plays in target language communication, affect and cognition. It integrates research tenets and video demonstrations of nonverbal behavior with structured activities that will guide teachers and learners of any language to capitalize on the nonverbal means at their disposal. It does not shy away from the challenges that nonverbal communication poses in target language communication, including issues of personal and cultural identity that emerge with languages around the world. With its easy-to-use format, solid research support, and fully integrated activities and videos, this book is an essential resource for anyone interested in working with the nonverbal dimensions of communication. The text will be especially valuable for language educators, pre- and in-service teachers who are looking for classroom resources and ideas, who want to create positive classroom environments and want to improve learner interaction and communication while increasing language proficiency. This book is a valuable resource for anyone who interacts with other people in more than one language.

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  Complete Stories of Kurt Vonnegut

  Jerome Klinkowitz, Kurt Vonnegut, Dan Wakefield, and Dave Eggers

  Here for the first time is the complete short fiction of one of the twentieth century's foremost imaginative geniuses. More than half of Vonnegut's output was short fiction, and never before has the world had occasion to wrestle with it all together. Organized thematically—"War," "Women," "Science," "Romance," "Work Ethic versus Fame and Fortune," "Behavior," "The Band Director" (those stories featuring Lincoln High's band director and nice guy George Hemholtz), and "Futuristic"—these ninety-eight stories were written from 1941 to 2007, and include those Vonnegut published in magazines and collected in Welcome to the Monkey House, Bagombo Snuff Box, and other books; here for the first time five previously unpublished stories; as well as a handful of others that were published online and read by few. During his lifetime Vonnegut published fewer than half of the stories he wrote, his agent telling him in 1958 upon the rejection of a particularly strong story, "Save it for the collection of your works which will be published someday when you become famous. Which may take a little time." -- Provided by publisher

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  Planting Red Geraniums : Discovered Poems of James Hearst

  Jim O'Loughlin

  James Hearst (1900-83) was celebrated as the Robert Frost of the Midwest, for his carefully wrought poems that drew from his roots as an Iowa farmer-poet. He published over 600 poems throughout his career, and his work was recognized in the 2001 collection, The Complete Poetry of James Hearst. Now, an unexpected discovery of previously unpublished James Hearst poems forms the core of Planting Red Geraniums: Discovered Poems of James Hearst. This collection provides an important addition to the canon of the poetry of James Hearst. 19 previously unpublished poems and four uncollected works offer insights into Hearst's creative process and introduces readers to poems that are as significant as the best of his previously published work.-- Provided by Publisher

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  TransGothic in Literature and Culture

  Jolene Zigarovich

  This book contributes to an emerging field of study and provides new perspectives on the ways in which Gothic literature, visual media, and other cultural forms explicitly engage gender, sexuality, form, and genre. The collection is a forum in which the ideas of several well-respected critics converge, producing a breadth of knowledge and a diversity of subject areas and methodologies. It is concerned with several questions, including: How can we discuss Gothic as a genre that crosses over boundaries constructed by a culture to define and contain gender and sexuality? How do transgender bodies specifically mark or disrupt this boundary crossing? In what ways does the Gothic open up a plural narrative space for transgenre explorations, encounters, and experimentation? With this, the volume’s chapters explore expected categories such as transgenders, transbodies, and transembodiments, but also broader concepts that move through and beyond the limits of gender identity and sexuality, such as transhistories, transpolitics, transmodalities, and transgenres. Illuminating such areas as the appropriation of the trans body in Gothic literature and film, the function of trans rhetorics in memoir, textual markers of transgenderism, and the Gothic’s transgeneric qualities, the chapters offer innovative, but not limited, ways to interpret the Gothic. In addition, the book intersects with but also troubles non-trans feminist and queer readings of the Gothic. Together, these diverse approaches engage the Gothic as a definitively trans subject, and offer new and exciting connections and insights into Gothic, Media, Film, Narrative, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. -- Provided by publisher

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  I'm Published! Now What?: An Author's Guide to Creating Successful Book Events, Readings, and Promotions

  Jeffrey S. Copeland

  This practical guide to conducting successful book readings, events, and promotions will help you understand and navigate the shifting sands of the publishing world. This guide will help demystify book marketing and prepare authors to work effectively with bookstore event coordinators, the best friends authors can have inside the stores. Copeland also shares what to do after events to maximize and build upon success. -- Provided by publisher

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  Continuity of the Conquest: Charlemagne and Anglo-Norman Imperialism

  Wendy Marie Hoofnagle

  The Norman conquerors of Anglo-Saxon England have traditionally been seen both as rapacious colonizers and as the harbingers of a more civilized culture, replacing a tribal Germanic society and its customs with more refined Continental practices. Many of the scholarly arguments about the Normans and their influence overlook the impact of the past on the Normans themselves. The Continuity of the Conquest corrects these oversights.

  Wendy Marie Hoofnagle explores the Carolingian aspects of Norman influence in England after the Norman Conquest, arguing that the Normans’ literature of kingship envisioned government as a form of imperial rule modeled in many ways on the glories of Charlemagne and his reign. She argues that the aggregate of historical and literary ideals that developed about Charlemagne after his death influenced certain aspects of the Normans’ ruling approach, including a program of conversion through “allurement,” political domination through symbolic architecture and propaganda, and the creation of a sense of the royal forest as an extension of the royal court.

  An engaging new approach to understanding the nature of Norman identity and the culture of writing and the problems of succession in Anglo-Norman England, this volume will enlighten and enrich scholarship on medieval, early modern, and English history. -- Provided by Amazon.com

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  Becoming Virginia Woolf: Her Early Diaries and the Diaries She Read

  Barbara Lounsberry

  Encompassing thirty-eight handwritten volumes, Virginia Woolf’s diary is her lengthiest and longest-sustained work—and her last to reach the public. In the only full-length book to explore deeply this luminous and boundary-stretching masterpiece, Barbara Lounsberry traces Woolf’s development as a writer through her first twelve diaries—a fascinating experimental stage, where the earliest hints of Woolf’s pioneering modernist style can be seen. -- Provided by the publisher

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  Virginia Woolf's Modernist Path: Her Middle Diaries & the Diaries She Read

  Barbara Lounsberry

  In this second volume of her acclaimed study of Virginia Woolf ’s diaries, Barbara Lounsberry traces the English writer’s life through the thirteen diaries she kept from 1918 to 1929—what is often considered Woolf’s modernist “golden age.” During these interwar years, Woolf penned many of her most famous works, including Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and A Room of One’s Own. Lounsberry shows how Woolf’s writing at this time was influenced by other diarists—Anton Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, Jonathan Swift, and Stendhal among them—and how she continued to use her diaries as a way to experiment with form and as a practice ground for her evolving modernist style. Through close readings of Woolf ’s journaling style and an examination of the diaries she read, Lounsberry tracks Woolf ’s development as a writer and unearths new connections between her professional writing, personal writing, and the diaries she was reading at the time. Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Path offers a new approach to Woolf ’s biography: her life as she marked it in her diary from ages 36 to 46. -- Provided by Amazon.com

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  Handbook of Research on Foreign Language Education in the Digital Age

  Congcong Wang and Lisa Winstead

  The role of technology in the learning process can offer significant contributions to help meet the increasing needs of students. In the field of language acquisition, new possibilities for instructional methods have emerged from the integration of such innovations.

  The Handbook of Research on Foreign Language Education in the Digital Age presents a comprehensive examination of emerging technological tools being utilized within second language learning environments. Highlighting theoretical frameworks, multidisciplinary perspectives, and technical trends, this book is a crucial reference source for professionals, curriculum designers, researchers, and upper-level students interested in the benefits of technology-assisted language acquisition. -- Provided by Amazon.com

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  Ain't No Harm to Kill the Devil: The Life and Legend of John Fairfield, Abolitionist for Hire

  Jeffrey S. Copeland

  One of the most amazing characters in American history was John Fairfield, a member of the Underground Railroad who helped slaves to freedom before the Civil War. His exploits are mentioned by notables such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Levi Coffin (the 'President' of the Underground Railroad). All greatly admired him but were shocked by his tactics. Fairfield was the only high-profile abolitionist to charge people for his work. Some assert Fairfield exploited the slaves because he charged relatives in Canada to get their family members to safety, but he used the fees to help concoct elaborate ruses that he used to steal the slaves and help them to freedom.

  One time he led nineteen slaves to freedom by pretending to be an undertaker taking the body of a slave across the Ohio River to a slave cemetery on the other side. He had one slave (in an open coffin) pretend to be the deceased--and the other eighteen marched in a funeral procession right through the middle of town in plain sight. The townspeople stepped aside, out of respect for the 'deceased,' and watched him take all of them across the river to their freedom! Another time he pretended to be a poultry dealer, gaining the respect of all in a town, and then stole their slaves. Still another time he passed himself off as a businessman who needed to build boats to take salt to the South for a very profitable venture. He got many of the leading citizens of that town to invest in his project, and when the boats were finished, he chose a moonless night to get all the slaves to the boats--and had them row to freedom.

  Fairfield was seen by some as a scoundrel, a con-man, and a criminal. Others saw him as a very religious man who believed with all his heart that the evils of slavery needed to be wiped out--and he was willing to go to extremes to help with that cause. Fairfield wasn't as violent as, say, John Brown, but he still got the job done. -- Provided by publisher

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  Finding Fairfield: The Behind the Scenes Story of "Ain't No Harm to Kill the Devil"

  Jeffrey S. Copeland

  Finding Fairfield is the "behind-the-scenes" story of the writing of Jeffrey Copeland's Ain't No Harm to Kill the Devil: The Life and Legend of John Fairfield, Abolitionist for Hire. John Fairfield was one of the most gifted and notorious abolitionists fighting for freedom for all in the decade before the American Civil War. In the pages of Finding Fairfield, Jeffrey recounts his adventures in gathering the details and information needed to write Fairfield's tale. These adventures took him to historic homes, important landmarks of the pre- Civil War era, Underground Railroad depots/museums, and other sites frequented by John Fairfield and others who proudly carried the torch of abolitionism. Jeffrey's journey was not always an easy one: getting terribly lost in the middle of nowhere while searching the Sandy & Beaver Canal system (a waterway once used to transport runaway slaves, by boat, to freedom), participating in a "ghost tour" near one of the most important Underground Railroad havens, and even spending the night in a haunted inn where John Fairfield himself once slept. Finding Fairfield also recounts Copeland's efforts to re-trace the journey made by John Fairfield when he once led nine slaves from Kentucky to their freedom in Canada. Finding Fairfield is both the story of a writer's craft and an engaging travelogue—a combination sure to please those who love American history and stories of "important Americans" who have had such profound impact on the world we live in today. - Provided by publisher

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  Language, Immigration and Labor: Negotiating Work in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

  Elise M. DuBord

  Language, Immigration, and Labor explores dominant ideologies about citizenship, nation, and language that frame the everyday lives of Spanish-speaking immigrants in the U.S.-Mexico border region. Focusing its ethnographic research on Arizona, a state that intensely regulates transnational migrants and Spanish speakers through its immigration and language policies, this book examines the realities of intercultural communication in fast-paced job negotiations between undocumented workers and their employers. The research reveals the ways that dominant discourses reverberate down to localized social and language practices and how day laborers respond by legitimating their participation in society—a kind of cultural citizenship—and constructing identities as language learners and productive workers. -- Provided by punisher

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  Frank Lloyd Wright and His Manner of Thought

  Jerome Klinkowitz

  An iconic figure in American culture, Frank Lloyd Wright is famous throughout the world. Although his achievements in architecture are stunning, it is his importance in cultural history, Jerome Klinkowitz contends, that makes Wright the object of such avid and continuing interest. Designing more than just buildings, Wright offered a concept for living that still influences how people conduct their lives today. Wright's innovations in architecture have been widely studied, but this is the most comprehensive and sustained treatment of his thought.

  Klinkowitz presents a critical biography driven by the architect's own work and intellectual growth, focusing on the evolution of Wright's thinking and writings from his first public addresses in 1894 to his last essay in 1959. Did Wright reject all of Victorian thinking about the home, or do his attentions to a minister's sermon on "the house beautiful" deserve closer attention? Was Wright echoing the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, or was he more in step with the philosophy of William James? Did he reject the Arts and Crafts movement, or repurpose its beliefs and practices for new times? And, what can be said of his deep dissatisfaction with architectural concepts of his own era, the dominant modernism that became the International Style? Even the strongest advocates of Frank Lloyd Wright have been puzzled by his objections to so much that characterized the twentieth century, from ideas for building to styles of living.

  In Frank Lloyd Wright and His Manner of Thought, Klinkowitz, a widely published authority on twentieth-century literature, thought, and culture, examines the full extent of Wright's books, essays, and lectures to show how he emerged from the nineteenth century to anticipate the twenty-first. -- Provided by publisher

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  Lamentations on the Rwandan Genocide: Poems

  Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure

  Lamentations on the Rwandan Genocide, 2nd Edition offers a powerful, poetic response to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and its aftermath. This edition of the collection by Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure adds three new poems and additional explanatory notes to his original 2006 collection. Ishmael Reed lauded that 2006 release, stating that Mvuyekure, one of our best critics, uses his rich, eloquent poetic voice to insure that the memories of one of the Twentieth Century s most horrific Holocausts won t be buried as unsung as the victims were.--From the publisher.

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  Editing Lives: Essays in Contemporary Textual and Biographical Studies in Honor of O M Brack, Jr.

  Jesse G. Swan

  Central to all post-Renaissance scholarship, textual studies continues to evolve, both in its techniques and methods as well as in the illumination it affords all other areas of modern knowledge. The life of our fellow human beings, and how we know and tell lives, is one such area of modern knowledge that is foundationally affected by theories and practices of textual creation, transmission, and apprehension. This collection of new essays and studies by internationally acclaimed scholars, along with a select few who are less acclaimed but of distinct promise, provides a view into the contemporary state of scholarship in textual and biographical studies. The collection also means to be of especial interest to scholars of the British eighteenth century, by concentrating its evidence and argument on topics and subjects important to contemporary eighteenth-century studies. The volume is inspired by the extensive contributions to the fields by the late O M Brack, Jr. -- Provided by publisher

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  Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature

  Jolene Zigarovich

  This book discusses sex and death in the eighteenth-century, an era that among other forms produced the Gothic novel, commencing the prolific examination of the century’s shifting attitudes toward death and uncovering literary moments in which sexuality and death often conjoined. By bringing together various viewpoints and historical relations, the volume contributes to an emerging field of study and provides new perspectives on the ways in which the century approached an increasingly modern sense of sexuality and mortality. It not only provides part of the needed discussion of the relationship between sex, death, history, and eighteenth-century culture, but is a forum in which the ideas of several well-respected critics converge, producing a breadth of knowledge and a diversity of perspectives and methodologies previously unseen. As the contributors demonstrate, eighteenth-century anxieties over mortality, the body, the soul, and the corpse inspired many writers of the time to both implicitly and explicitly embed mortality and sexuality within their works. By depicting the necrophilic tendencies of libertines and rapacious villains, the fetishizing of death and mourning by virtuous heroines, or the fantasy of preserving the body, these authors demonstrate not only the tragic results of sexual play, but the persistent fantasy of necro-erotica. This book shows that within the eighteenth-century culture of profound modern change, underworkings of death and mourning are often eroticized; that sex is often equated with death (as punishment, or loss of the self); and that the sex-death dialectic lies at the discursive center of normative conceptions of gender, desire, and social power. -- Provided by the publisher

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  Shell Games: The Life and Times of Pearl Mcgill, Industrial Spy and Pioneer Labor Activist

  Jeffrey S. Copeland

  Set against a backdrop of murder, intrigue, and industrial labor conflict in the early twentieth century pearl button industry, Shell Games graphically portrays one of the most important battles in the fight for safe and humane working conditions. Filtered through the thoughts and emotions of Pearl McGill, a woman who stood heroically against the injustices destroying the lives of so many around her in the shops and factories, this conflict vividly comes to life and underscores many of the concerns contemporary workers still encounter. -- Provided by publisher

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  Writing Death and Absence in the Victorian Novel: Engraved Narratives

  Jolene Zigarovich

  Writing Death and Absence in the Victorian Novel: Engraved Narratives asks its reader: Why do Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Wilkie Collins see the narrative act as a series of textual murders and resurrections? What does it mean to have an enigmatic ending? And what happens when the mortality of a character is left in our hands? Beginning with an exploration of narrative deferment, suspended mourning, and incomplete burials, Jolene Zigarovich uniquely argues that the missing body plot dramatizes the desire for cultural stability and religious certainty, and that the epitaph becomes the narrative model for rhetorical deaths. Drawing from theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, and Paul de Man, this study maintains that the narrating of death was important to the understanding of absence, separation, and displacement in an increasingly industrial and destabilizing culture. -- Provided by the publisher

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  Olivia's Story: The Conspiracy of Heroes Behind Shelley v. Kraemer

  Jeffrey S. Copeland

  The story of the landmark 1948 Supreme Court decision, Shelley v Kraemer, told through the voice of one of the participants, an African-American teacher in the St. Louis schools. Many battles have been fought through the years to gain dignity, justice and equality for all in America. Few of those battles have had the lasting significance and impact of the one described in the telling of Olivia's Story. Olivia Merriweather Perkins joined a brave group of people in St. Louis, Missouri who came together, without regard to their personal safety and well-being, to fight for rights that had been denied to people of color, the right to property. Their sacrifices eventually led to "Shelley vs Kraemer," one of the most important legal battles of modern times, the impact of which was felt in every corner of America. This legal case changed the face of a nation, not only in housing but also in other area taken for granted today. -- Provided by publisher

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  The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People

  Samuel Lyndon Gladden

  The Importance of Being Earnest marks a central moment in late-Victorian literature, not only for its wit but also for its role in the shift from a Victorian to a Modern consciousness. The play began its career as a biting satire directed at the very audience who received it so delightedly, but ended its initial run as a harbinger of Wilde's personal downfall when his lover's father, who would later bring about Wilde's arrest and imprisonment, attempted to disrupt the production. In addition to its focus on the textual history of the play, this Broadview Edition of Earnest provides a wide array of appendices. The edition locates Wilde's work among the artistic and cultural contexts of the late nineteenth century and will provide scholars, students, and general readers with an important sourcebook for the play and the social, creative, and critical contexts of mid-1890s English life. -- Provided by publisher

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  Antislavery Discourse and Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Incendiary Pictures

  Julie Husband

  Antislavery Discourse and Nineteenth-Century American Literature examines the relationship between antislavery texts and emerging representations of "free labor" in mid-nineteenth-century America. Husband shows how the images of families split apart by slavery, circulated primarily by women leaders, proved to be the most powerful weapon in the antislavery cultural campaign and ultimately turned the nation against slavery. She also reveals the ways in which the sentimental narratives and icons that constituted the "family protection campaign" powerfully influenced Americans sense of the role of government, gender, and race in industrializing America. Chapters examine the writings of ardent abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, non-activist sympathizers, and those actively hostile to but deeply immersed in antislavery activism including Nathaniel Hawthorne. -- Provided by publisher

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  Dramaturgas Puertorriquenas De 1990 A 2010

  Sara V. Rosell

  Examines Puerto Rican women playwrights' works in light of postcolonial theories. This work focuses on the notions of identity (sexual, racial, and transnational/transcultural), and gender construction. It includes writers from both the Island and the Diaspora. -- Provided by publisher

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  Kurt Vonnegut's America

  Jerome Klinkowitz

  Kurt Vonnegut's death on April 11, 2007, marked the passing of a major force in American life and letters. Jerome Klinkowitz, one of the earliest and most prolific authorities on Vonnegut, examines the long dialogue between the author and American culture--a conversation that produced fourteen novels and hundreds of short stories and essays. Spanning Vonnegut's half-century literary career, Kurt Vonnegut's America integrates discussion of myriad fiction, essays, and lectures with personal exchanges and biographical sketches to map the complex symbiotic relationship between Vonnegut's work and the cultural context from which it emerged--and which it in turn helped shape.

  Following an introduction characterizing Vonnegut as Klinkowitz came to know him over the course of their friendship, this study traces Vonnegut's career, decade by decade, drawing connections between the nation's preoccupations, the author's biography, and his literary productions. Vonnegut's 1950s saw him starting out as a short story writer, using his training in anthropology and experience in journalism and public relations to offer comic insights on middle-class behaviors. In the 1960s the author produced a series of darkly humorous novels rooted in the sense of apocalypse he'd experienced as a prisoner of war during the destruction of Dresden, Germany. Vonnegut's rising fame made him a public figure by 1970, with his novels and increasingly prominent essays serving as commentaries on the trends and patterns of these changing times. By the 1980s Vonnegut was sufficiently comfortable with his celebrity status to offer broader perspectives in his work, including his take on human evolution and artistic development. The 1990s found Vonnegut writing the strongest fiction and commentary of his career, melding them into a masterpiece, Timequake, the virtual autobiography of a novel.
  
  Among his artistic peers, Vonnegut was uniquely gifted at anticipating and articulating the changing course of American culture. Far from being A Man without a Country, as his last book was titled, Vonnegut achieved greatness by passing his own test--opening the eyes of his audience to help them better understand their roles and possibilities in the common culture they both shared and crafted. -- Provided by publisher

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  Love as Always, Kurt: Vonnegut as I Knew Him

  Loree Rackstraw

  A loving, intimate memoir from a lifelong friend of Kurt Vonnegut, including photos and never-before-published correspondence

  When Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. ducked into his classroom at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in September of 1965, his jokes drew only weak laughter and a few rolled eyes. But workshop student Loree Rackstraw was quietly impressed by this “great bear of a man” and his down-to-earth sensibilities about writing.

  That fall, an impossible romance began between the then-unknown author and his student—a brief affair that matured into a joyful, lifelong friendship. Rackstraw distills four decades of memories and Vonnegut’s letters to her into an affectionate memoir that crackles with the creative energy of one of America’s most beloved writers.

  Rackstraw’s unique perspective on Vonnegut’s life and how it shaped his famous works portrays a deeply humane man who looked for the humor and absurdity in life in order to survive. And then there are Vonnegut’s own letters: Whether energetic about new projects or frustrated with the “game” of writing and selling “a gazoolian copies,” Vonnegut writes with the playful imagination and generous, accessible brilliance that have always been his trademarks. -- Provided by publisher

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  Lovers & Strangers

  Grant A. Tracey

  Lovers & Strangers is a collection of thirteen stories, rockets through the complexities of love, internal struggle, and human relationships with a sense of wound and wonder. The title story explores the deepness of what love truly is. Throughout these looks at love, the narrative voice combines sharp, scenic detail with summary density. The tone is reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson and Bernard Malamud. Tracey’s characters are authentic, quirky, loving, innocent, and bound to truth by the universal desire to understand what makes us human, what it means to love, and be loved. -- Provided by publisher

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  Finding Purpose in Narnia: A Journey with Prince Caspian

  Gina Burkart

  Finding Purpose in Narnia weaves C.S. Lewis' biographical information from his own autobiography and letters to help readers better understand Prince Caspian, the second in the classic and wildly popular Chronicles of Narnia series. The author, who grew up loving these books, offers a series of reflections arranged in five parts shaped around the Scripture verse 1 Corinthians 13 and divided into three sections: Faith, Hope and Love.

  Just in time for the eagerly awaited movie, this engagingly written book is a resource that invites personal reflection and growth by inviting readers to interact with the insights of C.S. Lewis, the author's reflections, and Scripture passages. Throughout the book are helpful reflection questions help readers understand how C.S. Lewis found purpose in Narnia, and how we can as well. -- Provided by publisher

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  Fighting Kite: Poems

  Vince Gotera

  Fighting Kite narrates, in verse, the life of Martin Avila Gotera--son, trickster, soldier, schizophrenic, visionary, lawyer, workingman, father--a life that glimmers like the node, a shimmery knot, a glowing nexus, of the shared histories of the Philippines and the United States. -- Provided by the publisher

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  Cognitive Psychology

  M. Kimberly MacLin and Robert L. Solso

  One of the top sellers in the field, Cognitive Psychology is well-written, humorous, and remains one of the most comprehensive and balanced books in the area of cognition. MacLin and MacLin, inheriting the book from the late Robert L. Solso, boldly revised and reorganized the Eighth Edition to reflect emerging trends in the field, while retaining the strengths that made it one of the most popular books in the field. The book features a sequential model of human cognition from sensation to perception, to attention, to memory, to higher-order cognition, and features new cutting-edge coverage of consciousness, cognitive neuroscience, memory and forgetting, and evolutionary psychology. -- Provided by publisher

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  The "Dark Heathenism" of the American Novelist Ishmael Reed: African Voodoo As American Literary Hoodoo

  Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure

  This book posits that Neo-HooDooism, an African Voodoo-derived aesthetic, evinces Ishamel Reed s post-colonial transformation of the English language, colonialist discourses, and imperial cultural systems into discourses of self-empowerment and self-representation. As Reed s return to dark heathenism, Neo-HooDooism represents an attempt to rediscover pre-slavery and pre-colonial African languages and oral traditions to remedy the impact of physical and linguistic displacement that African-Americans continue to experience in the United States. Reed s nine novels are post-colonial writings whose production affects social, cultural, political, and historical contexts from African-American, American multi-ethnic, Caribbean, African, Third-World, and global perspectives. This book analyzes Neo-HooDooism as a post-colonial discourse/literary theory and a multi-cultural poetics through which Reed reconnects the African Diaspora to Africa within a global perspective. To accomplish this, an investigation is made into slavery, hegemony, language, place and displacement, race, gender, feminism, writing, post-coloniality, and theory as post-colonial themes that permeate Reed s nine novels. -- Provided by publisher

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  The Iron Curtain of Language

  Jennie Wang

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  Inman's War: A Soldier's Story of Life in a Colored Battalion in WWII

  Jeffrey S. Copeland

  "Inman's War is on one level an ugly story about America and racism and prejudice and discrimination and sexism, but it is also a human story, a story about real people, a story of friendship and loyalty, a story of the human spirit as it tries to overcome adversity. It is a magnificent slice of history." -Dick Gregory, from the Introduction
  
  Information about life in the "Colored Battalions" of WWII is very limited; this book takes a look inside a part of history hidden from the eyes of the world. Those who served in these battalions were unsung heroes of the Allies' fight for freedom and rights for all, yet they were often sacrificed along the way to attaining those goals. At long last, their story is told.
  
  Some of the most important and symbolic events in American history end up relegated to the dark corners of memory. Events once so significant become little more than footnotes, little more than wisps of story once held dear. This is such a story. There are accounts of the contributions of African Americans during the great conflict of WWII. However, most of these are group histories related to units such as the Red Ball Express, Tuskegee Airmen, and the Buffalo Soldiers. Individual, personal accounts of life and service in what were called the "Colored Battalions" are almost non-existent.
  
  This story is based in part upon the nearly one hundred and fifty letters written by Sergeant Inman Perkins during that period that detail his day to day life and his marriage while on leave to his young bride, Olivia. This book presents a look into the past that many thought locked away and forgotten forever, a look into an important slice of our American heritage off limits for too long to the eyes of history. From basic training to the war in Europe, Inman's War presents the fresh territory of a story not told before. It is the story of an individual, Inman Perkins, and it is also the story of the other African American heroes of this era. -- Provided by publisher

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  The Miniature Room: Poems

  Rebecca Dunham

  With tender probing and tight, expressive language, "The Miniature Room" explores the grace and power of the minuscule as it exists within an infinite universe. This 2006 T. S. Eliot Prize-winning collection utilizes rich imagery and complex interlocking meanings as author Rebecca Durham builds off the classical themes of art, history, nature, love, life, religion, and motherhood to provide a sensual and inquisitive body of work. -- Provided by publisher

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  The Enchanted Quest of Dana and Ginger Lamb

  Julie Huffman-Klinkowitz and Jerome Klinkowitz

  Best-selling authors, sensational lecturers, documentary filmmakers, amateur archaeologists, spies for FDR--Dana and Ginger Lamb led the life of Indiana Jones long before the movie icon was ever scripted. "We blaze the trail," Ginger said, "and the scientists follow."
  
  The Enchanted Quest of Dana and Ginger Lamb is the first biography of this captivating, entrepreneurial couple. In Southern California, they started married life in 1933 by building a canoe. With only $4.10 in their pockets, they paddled to Central America and through the Panama Canal. Three years later they returned triumphant, bearing a photographic record of the amazing trek that made them famous.
  
  After releasing their best-selling book, Enchanted Vagabonds, the two became exactly that. They relentlessly lectured for the public and mooned for the media until they were able to fund more exotic voyages to remote jungles and rivers. So convincing were they on the circuit that their most powerful fan, President Franklin Roosevelt, coerced J. Edgar Hoover into hiring the Lambs as spies in Mexico. After World War II they launched their Quest for the Lost City, which yielded another book and documentary.
  
  Drawing on historical records, the Lambs' books and letters, and recently declassified espionage documents, biographers Julie Huffman-klinkowitz and Jerome Klinkowitz show how the Lambs succeeded in marketing their conquests and films to armchair explorers around the world and how they became, in popular imagination, the quintessential American adventurers.
  
  As an independent scholar, Julie Huffman-klinkowitz has published widely in genealogy and popular culture. Jerome Klinkowitz is professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa and is the author of several books, including Pacific Skies: American Flyers in World War II (University Press of Mississippi). -- Provided by publisher

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  Lamentations on the Rwandan Genocide: Poems

  Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure

  Lamentations on the Rwandan Genocide by Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure is a poignant, often-painful reflection on the travesties of the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. This collection combines diverse linguistic and cultural traditions to offer poetic explorations of the violence and aftermath of genocide. With fifteen poems and an extensive section of notes on Rwandan culture, Lamentations on the Rwandan Genocide both documents a historical tragedy and forges new literary ground. -- Provided by publisher

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  Playing Mac: A Novella in Two Acts, and Other Scenes

  Grant A. Tracey

  In the novella Playing Mac, Stan doesn’t know why he’s auditioning for a community theater production of 42nd Street. Maybe it’s because his wife wants a divorce, his oldest son feels awkward around him, and his youngest son isn’t even talking. Maybe Stan just wants a fresh start, a new beginning. Whatever his initial motivation to act, Stan finds himself transformed through his theater experience. In playing Mac, Stan discovers a second family. He finds friendship, fellowship, and romance with Ciara, a woman half his age. He’s given a second chance in love and family, but will that promising future with Ciara be obscured by the past? This book also features eight other “scenes,” character-driven short stories with a lot of heart. -- Provided by publisher

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  Notes from the Flyover: Celebrating the Life and Works of Barbara Lounsberry

  Grant A. Tracey, G. Scott Cawelti, Ron Sandvik, and Barbara Lounsberry

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  Wen Pu Xi: Zhong Mei Wen Hua Shi Ye Xia De Mei Hua Wen Xue Yan Jiu

  Jennie Wang

  Proceedings of a conference called Querying the Genealogy : An International Conference on Chinese American Literature and Chinese Language Literature in the United States held in 2005 in Shanghai.

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  A Parent's Guide to Harry Potter

  Gina Burkart

  Harry Potter has captivated the imagination of millions of children. And Harry Potter has caused controversy in churches and schools. What's a parent to do with the magical, mystical world of Harry and his friends? Gina Burkart chose to read the books with her own children. As they read together, she discovered many parallels between Christian faith and the themes of these books. Indeed, the escapades of Harry Potter sparked significant conversation between Burkart and her kids. In this helpful, entertaining guide, Burkart shows how Harry Potter fits into the tradition of fairy tale writing and how this type of literature aids in building a moral framework. She highlights specific situations and emotions from Harry's world that children face in their own life, such as fear, anger, bullies, diversity and the choice of good over evil. Instead of magic words or easy answers, Burkart offers solid, practical advice for helping parents and children navigate Harry Potter's world--and our own--together. -- Provided by publisher

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  Postmodern Medievalisms

  Richard Utz and Jesse G. Swan

  Bringing together significant statements on postmodern qualities of the invocation of the medieval, Postmodern Medievalisms is a cross-disciplinary and international collection. The volume also effects a critically celebratory appreciation of the intellectual and political possibilities of the many inchoate modes implicit in various acts of "postmodern" scholarship. The essays treat texts from the late middle ages to the contemporary moment, and together they indicate, broadly, what is happening both in postmodern studies and studies in medievalism. The fourteen essays of the collection are organized into four sections, Music (including Pavel Chinizul, Negru Voda, Arvo Part), Art and Architecture (contemporary architecture, Robert Rauschenberg and more), Cinema (Tolkien, Bresson, I>Braveheart among the matters discussed), and Literature (including Sir John Mandeville, Marco Polo, Marvel, Naomi Mitchison). Contributors: FLORIN CURTA, PAUL MURPHY, LEOPOLD BRAUNEISS, JOHN M. GANIM, KARL FUGELSO, VERLYN FLIEGER, WILLIAM D. PADEN, BRIAN LEVY, LESLEY COOTE, A.E. CHRISTA CANITZ, JENNIFER COOLEY, PAUL SMETHURST, ELENA LEVY-NAVAFRO, ANITA OBERMEIER, SYLVIA MITTLER. -- Provided by publisher

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  Sephardic Identity: Essays on a Vanishing Jewish Culture

  George K. Zucker

  The Sephardim, a fast-disappearing group of Jews whose ancestors were exiled from the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the fifteenth century, have fought to retain their identity while necessarily assimilating to the surrounding society. This culture was changed by settlement and residence in non-Spanish areas for over four centuries, a Diaspora in the late nineteenth century, and the Nazi Holocaust. Sephardic settlements in Latin America, the United States, Israel, and elsewhere were the result. Because Judaism is as much a culture as a religion, any move toward assimilation into a non-Jewish culture has historically been seen as a threat to Jewish identity: this is an ongoing crisis in Sephardic life. These essays, representing some of the most innovative work being done in Sephardic studies, are divided into sections exploring history, sociology, anthropology, language, literature and the performing arts. Topics include the possibility that the Sephardim are Judaized Arabs, Berbers and Iberians; the role of Spanish exiles in the Ottoman Empire; Sephardic remnants in Greece; Sephardic philosophy; the literature of New Christians (the community that arose out of forcibly converted Jews) whose works reveal Jewish roots; the Judeo-Spanish press in Salonika; and the influences of Sephardism on contemporary Argentine literature. An introduction to Sephardism begins the work and a conclusion discusses the Sephardic Education Center, which hopes to assure the culture's future. -- Provided by publisher

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  Daily Life in the Industrial United States, 1870- 1900

  Julie Husband and Jim O'Loughlin

  Daily life in the Industrial age was ever-changing, unsettling, outright dangerous, and often thrilling. Electric power turned night into day, cities swelled with immigrants from the countryside and from Europe, and great factories belched smoke and beat unnatural rhythms while turning out consumer goods at an astonishing pace. Distance and time condensed as rail travel and telegraph lines tied the vast United States together as never before. First-hand accounts from workers, housewives, and children help illuminate the significant achievements of the era and their impact on the everyday lives of ordinary people. Readers will learn of a broad range of personal experiences, while comprehending the importance of the economic and social developments of the period. A chronology, a glossary, more than 40 photographs, and further reading sources complete the work. -- Provided by publisher

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  Pacific Skies: American Flyers in World War II

  Jerome Klinkowitz

  From 1941 to 1945 the skies over the Pacific Ocean afforded the broadest arena for battle and the fiercest action of air combat during World War II. It was in the air above the Pacific that America's involvement in the war began. It was in these skies that air power launched from carriers became a new form of engagement and where the war ultimately ended with kamikaze attacks and with atomic bombs dropped over Japan.
  
  Throughout the conflict American flyers felt a compelling call to supplement the official news and military reports. In vivid accounts written soon after combat and in reflective memoirs recorded in the years after peace came, both pilots and crew members detailed their stories of the action that occurred in the embattled skies. Their first-person testimonies describe a style of warfare invented at the moment of need and at a time when the outcome was anything but certain.
  
  Gathering more than a hundred personal narratives from Americans and from Japanese, Pacific Skies recounts a history of air combat in the Pacific theater. Included are the words of such famous aces and bomber pilots as Joe Foss, Pappy Boyington, Dick Bong, and Curtis Lemay, as well as the words of many rank-and-file airmen. Together their stories express fierce individualism and resourcefulness and convey the vast panorama of war that included the skies over Pearl Harbor, Wake, and Guadalcanal and missions from Saipan and Tinian.
  
  As Pacific Skies recounts the perilous lives of pilots in their own words, Jerome Klinkowitz weaves the individual stories into a gripping historical narrative that exposes the shades of truth and fiction that can become blurred over time. A book about experiencing and remembering, Pacific Skies also is a story of unique perspectives on the war.
  
  Jerome Klinkowitz, a professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa, is the author of forty books, including such World War II titles as Their Finest Hours, Yanks over Europe, and With Tigers over China. -- Provided by publisher

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  The Vonnegut Effect

  Jerome Klinkowitz

  Kurt Vonnegut is one of the few American writers since Mark Twain to have won and sustained a great popular acceptance while boldly introducing new themes and forms on the literary cutting edge. This is the "Vonnegut effect" that Jerome Klinkowitz finds unique among postmodernist authors. In this innovative study of the author's fiction, Klinkowitz examines the forces in American life that have made Vonnegut's works possible. -- Provided by publisher

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  Homo Narrans: Texts and Essays in Honor of Jerome Klinkowitz

  Jerome Klinkowitz, Zygmunt Mazur, and Richard J. Utz

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  West African Kingdoms, 500-1590

  Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure

  World Eras is patterned after the award-winning American Decade's series. Covering areas often overlooked by other publications, World Eras provides a multicultural approach that directly reflects changing curriculum standards, with a cross-disciplinary overview of world history and a strong emphasis of daily life and social history.

  Each volume in this set contains in-depth coverage of one era and is organized into ten chapters: World events -- A Chronology; Geography; The Arts -- Sculpture, Architecture, Painting and Music; Communications, Transportation and Exploration; Social class Systems and the Economy -- focusing on social-economic hierarchy ; Politics, Law and the Military; Leisure, Recreation and Daily life -- housing, clothing, food, education, etc.; Family and Social Trends -- customs, beliefs, roles and responsibilities; Religion and Philosophy; Science, Technology and Health.

  Each volume includes an introductory essay that provides context and overview of the era written by a scholar in the field and will contain 150 photographs, line drawings, diagrams, illustrations and sidebars. Each chapter within a volume includes an introductory essay, a timeline, entries on specific topics, events or movements, biographies of prominent individuals, and important publications of the era. A glossary of subject-specific terms appears at the end of the book.

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  Ghost Wars

  Vince Gotera

  Winner of the 2004 Global Filipino Award for Poetry, Ghost Wars brings together sixteen new and previously published poems that work to understand the effects of war on all who are touched by it. As a Vietnam era veteran, as well as the grandson, son, and brother of combat veterans, Gotera writes from experience on the contradictory psychological demands made of soldiers. In Ghost Wars men in combat exist in the moment, capturing and being captured by the power of violence. But the individuals of war s aftermath live with the implications of their actions, struggling with an always-present past as they endeavor to carve out moments of understanding, of forgiveness, and of love. -- Provided by the publisher

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  Parallel Lines and the Hockey Universe

  Grant A. Tracey

  Parallel Lines and the Hockey Universe is a novel that is often like a short story collection--it begins with a family of Macedonian-Canadians, the Traicheffs. One son stays in a working class suburb of Toronto, driving a cab while he tries to decide what to do with his life. His brother marries a middle-class Iowan and takes to writing sports for the Waterloo paper. He writes about hockey, the Canadian national game, which has also emigrated. And Tracey writes about the players on the team and their coaches and fans, about the kids the brothers knew in school, and about the music and movies they use as points of reference on their way to adulthood. I read it all at once, almost afraid to pause to look back at a book so undeniably real. Like life, perusal has no time outs. -- Provided by publisher

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  Courtiers, Courtesans, Picaros, and Prostitutes: the art and artifice of selling one's self in Golden Age Spain

  Jennifer Jo Cooley

  This work examines the place of literature in Golden Age Spain by exploring the implications of the shifting means of evaluating the worth of the individual in a culture bent on preserving traditional societal divisions. A blend of textual analysis of canonical literature and theoretical concerns, the examination of traditionally divergent sets of literary genres explores two disparate worldviews, the cultural elite versus the marginalized. The book analyzes questions of social mobility and linguistic performance: how battles for the acquisition and preservation of status lead to the ultimate revelation of the ‘self’s’ verbal and intellectual skills as merely a ruse. The emergence of a ‘self’ defined by its success in social exchange then becomes a parallel for commercial exchange in a developing capitalist society.

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  Medieval Forms of Argument: Disputation and Debate

  Georgiana Donavin, Carol Poster, and Richard Utz

  These studies illustrate the various high and late medieval transformations of formal and formalized argument, from a broadly interdisciplinary perspective and it challenges today's dominant disciplinary approaches to what was and is still a pervasive mode of thought in the West. Many current treatments of disputational texts have a narrow focus either on the history of scholasticism, rhetoric, and pedagogy, or the genesis and function of such period-specific forms of academic altercation as demonstrative, dialectic, or sophistic disputation, or the later quaestiones, quodlibeta, and sophismata. Moreover, scholarship in literature often ignores the parallel structures of academic argument and narrowly focuses on the narrative and aesthetic functions of debate poetry. In contrast to these tendencies, the contributions to this volume afford a view which enables readers to recognize that the manifold formalized discursive practices of positing a thesis, constructing a counter antithesis, and then finding a synthesis permeated not only the cathedral schools and universities and their direct textual products (commentaries, formal disputations, sermons, and so forth), but were received by a wide range of other discursive realms. Especially in the high and late Middle Ages the academic disputation gradually moved from the isolation of the universities and toward extracurricular forms of debate between theologians (e.g., the public quaestiones disputatae; epistolary theological debates between Christians and Muslims) and in literary genres (e.g. querelle, debate poem). By confronting sample investigations from all these related forms of medieval argument, the volume examines the ways in which disputational forms - sometimes directly dependent on academic practices, sometimes showing organizational, structural, and discursive parallels - established themselves as a central mode of thinking for Western society. To achieve this goal, the volume unites contributions from the English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian traditions of the disputational mode and discusses central issues of academic, political, theological, courtly and literary debates. -- Provided by publisher

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  Shelley's Textual Seductions: Plotting Utopia in the Erotic and Political Works

  Samuel Lyndon Gladden

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  Filmography of American History

  Grant A. Tracey

  Containing over 200 films, this resource is ideal for students, teachers, and other viewers who are interested in using films to enhance their knowledge of American historical events and periods. Along with traditional historical categories, such as the two World Wars, the Civil War, and the Great Depression, the book emphasizes immigrant, multicultural, and women-centered films to portray the fullness of the American experience. It also analyzes representations of people and events across different films for a variety of viewpoints, and considers how films reconfigure a past era through the issues of the day in which they were produced.

  For ease of use, the book is organized into time periods. Each entry contains:

  -- the setting

  -- director

  -- cast

  -- credits

  -- the year of production

  -- distributor

  Ratings are supplied to identify audience-appropriateness. The detailed narrative supplies a brief plot summary along with a thesis supported by strong examples from the film, such as excerpts of dialogue and factual details from history. The entries encourage readers to view the film through the lens of history and to consider it within the larger nexus of films listed in that particular chapter. Frequently, the historical focus considers both the time period depicted in the film and the time period in which it was made. The running times provide readers with a quick access to key scenes for further study. Each entry also concludes with sources for further reading, and indexes identify those films with multicultural and women's themes. -- Provided by publisher

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  Chaucer and the Discourse of German Philology: A History of Reception and an Annotated Bibliography of Studies, 1793-1948

  Richard Utz

  In her magisterial study, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, 1357-1900, Caroline Spurgeon stated that 'The work done on Chaucer by scholars in modern Germany is so vast that it would need a volume to itself to deal adequately with it'. This study fills this scholarly desideratum by surveying the genesis and development of the largest body of non-Anglophone Chaucer criticism from the beginning of the nineteenth century to 1945. Such a history of Chaucer reception mirrors the general cultural and political developments in Germany and in German academia from the revolutionary and liberal Chaucer of the 'Vormaerz' (pre-March 1848) period, the conservative Chaucer of the post-1848 restoration, the 'Germanization' of Chaucer after the country's formation as a nation state (1871), the demise of German Chaucer studies after World War I and during the Weimar Republic, the ideological utilization of Chaucer during the Third Reich, to the sporadic Chaucer criticism after 1945. A strong focus will be upon the 'Chaucerphilologie' (1870-1914) when philological positivism evolved and triumphed, and how even today positivism and philological source study and editorial work is esteemed above 'foreign' (non-German) scholars who engage in aestheticist, essayistic and hence 'unscientific' approaches. The study follows German Chaucer criticism in a largely chronological manner, with biographies of key scholars (Ten Brink, Koch, Zupitza) and studies of specific philological feuds (Lange vs. Langhans on the authenticity of Chaucer's translation of the Roman de la Rose; Curtius vs. Glunz on the superiority of philology over literary aesthetics). The investigation is based on the theories of Anglo-American 'Medievalism' (and 'New' Medievalism/Philology) and its German sibling 'Mittelalter-Rezeption', the reception theories of Iser, Jauss and Fish, and discourse theories of Foucault. -- Provided by publisher

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  You've Got to Be Carefully Taught: Learning and Relearning Literature

  Jerome Klinkowitz

  Drawing on his own experience in the profession, veteran English professor and internationally renowned scholar Jerome Klinkowitz sorts out the wrong ways of teaching literature before devising a new, successful method. Specifically, he concludes that a historically based “story of English” is precisely the wrong narrative approach to making sense of what literature does. Instead, Klinkowitz proposes a new method focused not on the product of literary writing but on the process of writing. Long involved with the making of contemporary literature, Klinkowitz shows how his classroom approach draws on the same strengths and inspirations writers use in the creation of literature. He involves students in the literary work as production.
  
  Despite almost universal agreement that literary studies fail both writers and students, solutions have been limited to suggestions by superstar theorists teaching cream-of-the-crop students at elite universities. Klinkowitz aims not at the elite but at the ordinary student in an introduction to literature class. His goal is to introduce teachers to a new philosophy of teaching literature and to further deepen students’ natural love for the subject. He also seeks to revive the love of fine writing in those whose joy in the subject fell victim to obtuse teaching methods. Uniquely, his is not an esoteric theory developed by the best academics for elite students but a commonsense approach that works well in the kind of schools most students attend. -- Provided by publisher

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  Face of the Earth, Heart of the Sky

  Mario Roberto Morales and Edward Waters Hood

  Face of the Earth, Heart of the Sky is a novel that accurately depicts the horrors of the Guatemalan civil war fought out in the 1980s. In these pages we encounter the distinct voices of the elderly, the children, and the men and women whose stories from the Left and from the Right which Mario Morales collected and then wove together in this articulate, powerful, candid, vividly recounted, memorable work. -- Provided by publisher

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  Owning a Piece of the Minors

  Jerome Klinkowitz

  Owning a Piece of the Minors is by and about a man who lived his dream and acquired a baseball team. When Jerry Klinkowitz joined the group that ran the Waterloo, Iowa, Diamonds in the 1970s, ownership of a minor league baseball franchise conferred little mystique. Neglected for a half century, minor league baseball was at best obscure. Yet in the purchase of fantasy, what difference if your desire is out of style?
  
  Klinkowitz continued his work with the Diamonds through the 1980s and much of the 1990s. In Owning a Piece of the Minors, he maps out his personal journey through baseball and probes his fluctuating fortunes and those of his team as he evolves from a fan to a team executive and, most important, to a writer writing about baseball. This baseball story begins with a nine-year-old Klinkowitz who is elated when Milwaukee lures the Braves from Boston; this story of a love affair with baseball might have died—and in fact suffered a ten-year hiatus—when the apostate Braves fled to Atlanta in 1965.
  
  Klinkowitz rediscovered the joy of being at the baseball park when, as a middle-aged professor, he took his own children to the Waterloo Diamonds games. Gradually his involvement with the Diamonds grew deeper until he owned the team. His immersion into team activities was complete, from shagging batting practice and working the beer bar to struggling with the Cleveland Indians and then the San Diego Padres as minor league affiliates to accommodate baseball's resurgence.
  
  Klinkowitz writes of loss—first the Braves and later the Diamonds; of writing baseball fiction; of attending the 1982 World Series back in Milwaukee; of the great old ballparks around the country, including Wrigley, Fenway, and old Comiskey Park; of fictional and factual accounts of how the Diamonds franchise was lost; of friendships among season ticket holders in "Box 28"; and of Mildred Boyenga, the club president and Baseball Woman of the Year. A first-rate stylist, Klinkowitz shows the problems and perks and, most rewarding, the priceless relationships made possible in the world of baseball. -- Provided by publisher

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  With the Tigers Over China, 1941-1942

  Jerome Klinkowitz

  In the twelve months centered around the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a diverse group of American and British flyers fought one of the most remarkable air campaigns of WWII. Pilots including Claire Chennault, "Pappy" Boyington, and Art Donahue bought time for an Allied regrouping against Japan's relentless assault in the China-Burma-India theater. In the face of the 1941 bombings, Chiang Kai-shek turned to air power to survive, which he did thanks to Chennault's rebuilding of the Chinese Air Force and the leadership of the American Volunteer Group, or AVG. Formed by Chennault, the AVG, also known as the Flying Tigers, were contract employees working for the Chinese government. As a result, they received virtually no official American recognition for their efforts. The group was known for their romantic, reckless spirit. They performed remarkably with outdated planes and equipment in ill-repair, were almost always heavily outnumbered in battle, and were seen by outsiders as hard-drinking rebels. Whatever their image, the Flying Tigers were highly effective. In the words of Air Force Major General Charlie Bond, "During that first week of action the AVG destroyed fifty-five enemy bombers and fighters while losing only five Tomahawks. Unfortunately, two of our colleagues were killed, but at the same time two hundred enemy airmen were either killed or captured. We were shattering the myth that the Japanese Air Force was invincible." Jerome Klinkowitz, whose earlier books focused on flyers' attitudes toward the air war in Britain and Europe, continues his work with an exceptionally interesting group of Pacific warriors. He brings together not only the commanders' stories but the often more colorful--and sometimes more accurate--accounts of life and battle by the men who flew these planes and the women who participated on the ground. -- Provided by publisher

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  Everything Paid For

  Robley Wilson

  Robley Wilson’s third book of poems is written in a delightful variety of forms--syllabics, couplets, nonce sonnets, internal rhymes, and a marvelously supple blank verse. His concerns are the age-old concerns of being human: the difficulty of loving and communicating, the maddening challenges of living a "normal" life in suburbia, the ripple effect of our every act on others. But there is nothing dour in his approach. His tone is often wry and witty, always thoughtful. He digs deep and comes up with poems written from totally unexpected perspectives--the Kent State massacre from the point of view of one of the now-aging National Guardsmen; World War II from the point of view of a German girl chosen to present flowers to General Himmler; or a man living (literally) on the moon. Wilson has published four books of stories, and his gift as a storyteller is apparent in these poems. He sets the scene, gives us the facts--of a life, a mood, a moment--and we are drawn into the world of each separate poem. "Judge not . . ." is implicit, and we see ourselves in these poems and learn about ourselves as we read. Robley Wilson, editor of the North American Review, is professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls. He has published two previous books of poetry, Kingdoms of the Ordinary (1987) and A Pleasure Tree (1991). -- Provided by publisher

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  The Tales We Tell: Perspectives on the Short Story

  Rick Feddersen, Susan Lohafer, Barbara Lounsberry, and Mary Rohrberger

  The 1990s have seen a renaissance in short fiction studies. Today's short story writers are testing the boundaries of short fiction through minimalist works; extended short story cycles; narrative nonfiction forms, such as histories, memoirs, and essays; and even stories created interactively with readers on the computer. Short story critics, in turn, are viewing the short story from the perspective of genre, history, cultural studies, and even cognitive science. This volume brings together the opinions, theories, and research of many of today's best-known short story writers, theorists, and critics. Contributors include some of the most widely read contemporary authors, such as Joyce Carol Oates, John Barth, Gay Talese, W. P. Kinsella, Robert Coover, Barry Hannah, and Leslie Marmon Silko. -- Provided by the publisher

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  Keeping Literary Company: Working with Writers Since the Sixties

  Jerome Klinkowitz

  Starting in the 1960s, a group of radically new fiction writers began having success at reinventing the novel and short story for postmodern times. These writers found an ally in a young reader named Jerome Klinkowitz. Beginning in 1969 he published the first scholarly essays on Vonnegut, Kosinski, Barthelme, and the others in turn. Keeping Literary Company details Klinkowitz's work with these writers - not just researching their fiction and other publications, but introducing them to one another and taking part in the business-world activities that spread news of their innovations. He shows how what they wrote was so much a part of those turbulent times that a new literary generation found itself defined in such works as Slaughterhouse-Five, Being There, and Snow White. Here is a fascinating first-person account of what these important figures wrote, how they wrote it, and what it means in the development of American fiction. -- Provided by publisher

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  Vonnegut in Fact: The Public Spokesmanship of Personal Fiction

  Jerome Klinkowitz

  In this volume, Jerome Klinkowitz traces the emergence of Vonnegut's nonfiction since the 1960s, when commentary and feature journalism replaced his rapidly dying short-story market. Offering close readings and insightful criticism of Vonnegut's three major works of nonfiction, his many uncollected pieces, and his unique manner of public speaking, Klinkowitz explains how Vonnegut's personal visions developed into a style of great public responsibility that mirrored the growth of his fiction. The investigation of the writer's extensive nonfiction provides a key to understanding his distinctively inventive novels and the manner in which his public spokesmanship influenced his artistic expression. -- Provided by publisher

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  Medievalism in the Modern World: Essays in Honour of Leslie J. Workman

  Richard Utz, T. A. Shippey, and Leslie J. Workman

  This interdisciplinary collection of essays from leading scholars in Europe, North America, and Australia examine the phenomenon of medievalism from the perspective of history, politics, scholarship, art, and literature.

  The twenty-six essays in this volume examine the process of creating the Middle Ages. In doing so, they honour Leslie Workman, who has led the revival of the study of medievalism in the past two generations, and leads this sub-discipline towards the comprehensiveness that Lord Acton as early as 1859 had promised: ´Two great principles divide the world, and contend for the mastery: antiquity and the Middle Ages. These are the two civilizations that have preceded us, the two elements of which ours is composed. All political as well as religious questions reduce themselves practically to this. This is the great dualism that runs through our society.` While using different approaches and discussing topics in a variety of specialised fields, the contributions clearly centre on negotiating the reception of medieval culture in the Early Modern, Modern and Contemporary periods, thus presenting a broad and representative picture of current research in medievalism.--From the publisher.

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  Nominalism And Literary Discourse: New Perspectives

  Hugo Keiper, Christoph Bode, and Richard Utz

  Influential accounts of European cultural history variously suggest that the rise of nominalism and its ultimate victory over realist orientations were highly implemental factors in the formation of Modern Europe since the later Middle Ages, but particularly the Reformation. Quite probably, this is a simplification of a state of affairs that is in fact more complex, indeed ambiguous. However, if there is any truth in such propositions - which have, after all, been made by many prominent commentators, such as Panofsky, Heer, Blumenberg, Foucault, Eco, Kristeva - we may no doubt assume that literary texts will have responded and in turn contributed, in a variety of ways, to these processes of cultural transformation. It seems of considerable interest, therefore, to take a close look at the complex, precarious position which literature, as basically a symbolic mode of signification, held in the perennial struggles and discursive negotiations between the semiotic 'twin paradigms' of nominalism and realism.

  
  This collection of essays (many of them by leading scholars in the field) is a first comprehensive attempt to tackle such issues - by analyzing representative literary texts in terms of their underlying semiotic orientations, specifically of nominalism, but also by studying pertinent historical, theoretical and discursive co(n)texts of such developments in their relation to literary discourse. At the same time, since 'literary nominalism' and 'realism' are conceived as fundamentally aesthetic phenomena instantiating a genuinely 'literary debate over universals', consistent emphasis is placed on the discursive dimension of the texts scrutinized, in an endeavour to re-orient and consolidate an emergent research paradigm which promises to open up entirely new perspectives for the study of literary semiotics, as well as of aesthetics in general. Historical focus is provided by concentrating on the English situation in the era of transition from late medieval to early modern (c. 1350-1650), but readers will also find contributions on ChrÉtien de Troyes and Rabelais, as well as on the 'aftermath' of the earlier debates - as exemplified in studies of Locke and (post)modern critical altercations, respectively, which serve to point up the continuing relevance of the issues involved. A substantial introductory essay seeks to develop an overarching theoretical framework for the study of nominalism and literary discourse, in addition to offering an in-depth exploration of the 'nominalism/realism-complex' in its relation to literature. An extensive bibliography and index are further features of interest to both specialists and general readers. -- Provided by publisher

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  Odyssey of the Psyche: Jungian Patterns in Joyce's Ulysses

  Jean Kimball

  The result of the interaction between Bloom and Dedalus, Kimball argues as a central tenet in her unique reading of Ulysses, is the gradual development of a relationship between the two protagonists that parallels C. G. Jung’s descriptions of the encounter between the Ego and the Shadow in that stage of his theoretical individuation process called "the realization of the shadow." These parallels form a unifying strand of meaning that runs throughout this multidimensional novel and is supported by the text and contexts of Ulysses. Kimball has provided the first comprehensive study of the relationship between Jungian psychology and Joyce’s Ulysses. Bucking critical trends, she focuses on Stephen rather than Bloom. She also notes certain parallels—synchronicities—in the lives of both Jung and Joyce, not because the men influenced one another but because they speculated about personality at the same historical time. Finally, noting that both Jung and Joyce came from strong Christian backgrounds, she asserts that the doubleness of the human personality fundamental to Christian theology is carried over into Jung’s psychology and Joyce’s fiction. -- Provided by publisher

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  Contemporary Popular Writers

  Dave Mote, Jerome Klinkowitz, and Julie Huffman-Klinkowitz

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  Ready-To-Use Activities for Teaching Much Ado About Nothing

  John Wilson Swope

  Each volume contains more than 100 classroom-tested whole-language activities ranging from role-playing, response journals, character study, and language exploration. Includes extended activities, reproducible maps, and background information. -- Provided by publisher

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  Novelistic Love in the Platonic Tradition: Fielding, Faulkner and the Postmodernists

  Jennie Wang

  The love story is an integral part of many novels. What is its narrative status? How does it function, and why? In this original study of Socratic 'love stories,' from Plato through Fielding and Faulkner to the Postmodernists, Jennie Wang proposes a new narrative theory in the study of the novel, which deconstructs the mimesis of 'love stories' and reconstructs their historicity. Wang claims that in the Platonic tradition, the construction of 'love stories' is often a dramatization of the author's historical vision, philosophical speculations, cultural criticism, or political ideology. Novelistic love functions as a literary medium, a power of free speech, that enables the novelist to speak unspeakable truths and include excluded subjects. -- Provided by publisher

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  Here at Ogallala State U. : The Collected Effusions (With Commentary) of Our "Milt" Elliott

  Jerome Klinkowitz

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  Yanks Over Europe: American Flyers in World War II

  Jerome F. Klinkowitz

  Contrasts between fighter combat and the bombers' war support Klinkowitz's belief that notions of the air war were determined by one's position in it. He extends his thesis by showing the vastly different style of air war described by veterans of the North African and Mediterranean campaigns and concludes by studying the effects of such combat on adversaries and victims. - Provided by publisher

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  A University in Pursuit of Quality: The Future of Learning and Teaching at the University of Northern Iowa

  G. Roger Sell and Barbara Lounsberry

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  Writing Creative Nonfiction: The Literature of Reality

  Gay Talese and Barbara Lounsberry

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  Basepaths

  Jerome Klinkowitz

  In the timeless world of fiction it is "next year" for the Mason City Royals of Jerry Klinkowitz's award-winning Short Season and Other Stories. Who's back? Just three players: Billy Harmon, Dave Alpert, and the baby-fat slugger Mark Wiggins. But that's good, for in minor league baseball the best players are promoted while the failures are dropped. So except for Billy, Dave, and Mark, who expect just another half-season of fine-tuning before moving up, it's an open field for a new season of hopes and dreams - but for nightmares too. The team gets a new manager, Ken Boyenga (with a colorful major league past) just as its local ownership elects a new club president, Al Swenson (a man with two daughters and a business with the hopeful title of "Swenson & Son Electric"). Plus there's Mike Jacobs, a contract garbage hauler who's just joined the board of directors (and already thinks he owns the team). Added to the busload of rookies on this fresh season's team, this "new leadership" on and off the field lets readers enjoy the parallel spectacle of a sports business being constructed - and deconstructed - and finally utterly demolished right before their eyes all in the spirit of boisterous hilarity that has come to characterize minor league baseball at its most fun. -- Provided by publisher

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  Investigating the Unliterary: Six Essays on Burrough's Tarzan of the Apes

  Richard Utz and Elizabeth Sharpe

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  Speaking of Poets 2: More Interviews with Poets Who Write for Children And Young Adults

  Jeffery Scott Copeland and Vicky L. Copeland

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  Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women

  Annie Finch

  A collection of more than 40 poems including brief critical statements by each poet and concise critical mini-essays on the poetry of each poet. Finch examines the course of 20th century poetry by American women, exploring the strain of male dominance that submerged more than two generations of women writers. -- Provided by publisher

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  Dragonfly

  Vince Gotera

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  Radical Visions: Poetry by Vietnam Veterans

  Vince Gotera

  The first comprehensive study devoted exclusively to poetry by Vietnam veterans, Radical Visions argues that this body of writing registers an important advance in the aesthetics and poetics of war literature and offers a cogent antiwar statement rooted in personal experience. -- Provided by the publisher

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  Speaking of Poets: Interviews with Poets Who Write for Children and Young Adults

  Jeffrey S. Copeland

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  The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse

  Annie Finch

  A groundbreaking study of the connections among meter, the poetic unconscious, and wider literary and cultural forces. -- Provided by the publisher

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  New Horizons in Sephardic Studies

  Yedida K. Stillman and George Zucker

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  Structuring the Void: The Struggle for Subject in Contemporary American Fiction

  Jerome Klinkowitz

  If, as the literary theorists of postmodernism contend, “content” does not exist, then how can fiction continue to be written? Jerome Klinkowitz, himself a veteran practitioner and theorist of fiction, addresses this question in Structuring the Void, an account of what today’s novelists and short story writers do when they produce a fictive work. Klinkowitz’s focus is on the way in which writers have turned this lack of content itself into subject matter, and, by thus “structuring the void,” have created a new form of fiction. Among the writers Klinkowitz discusses are Richard Brautigan, Kurt Vonnegut, Max Apple, Saul Bellow, Erica Jong, Susan Quist, Gerald Rosen, Rob Swigart, and Grace Paley. He shows how, in the absence of subject matter, these writers persist in the act of structuring—by organizing autobiography as a narrative device, ritualizing national history and popular culture, or formalizing a comic response to a new imaginative state, the state of California. Klinkowitz also considers subjects such as gender and war, which, though they cannot be represented, nevertheless exercise constraints on a writer’s intention to structure. What emerges from Klinkowitz’s analysis is a clear sense of what today’s fiction—and fiction writing—is about. As such, Structuring the Void will prove invaluable to anyone with an interest in contemporary literature. -- Provided by publisher

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  The Writer in You: A Writing Process Reader

  Barbara Lounsberry

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  Donald Barthelme: An Exhibition

  Jerome Klinkowitz

  Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) is regarded as one of the most imitated and influential American fiction writers since the early 1960s. In Donald Barthelme: An Exhibition, Jerome Klinkowitz presents both an appreciation and a comprehensive examination of the life work of this pathbreaking contemporary writer. A blend of close reading, biography, and theory, this retrospective—informed by Klinkowitz’s expert command of postmodern American fiction—contributes significantly to a new understanding of Barthelme’s work. Klinkowitz argues that the central piece in the Barthelme canon, and the key to his artistic method, is his widely acknowledged masterpiece, The Dead Father. In turning to this pivotal work, as well as to Barthelme’s short stories and other novels, Klinkowitz explores the way in which Barthelme reinvented the tools of narration, characterization, and thematics at a time when fictive techniques were largely believed to be exhausted. Klinkowitz, who was one of the first scholars to study Barthelme’s work and became its definitive bibliographer, situates Barthelme’s life and work within a broad spectrum of influences and affinities. A consideration of developments in painting and sculpture, for example, as well as those of contemporaneous fiction, contribute to Klinkowitz’s analysis. This astute reading will provide great insight for readers, writers, and critics of contemporary American fiction seeking explanations and justifications of Barthelme’s critical importance in the literature of our times. -- Provided by publisher

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  Listen-Gerry Mulligan: An Aural Narrative in Jazz

  Jerome Klinkowitz

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  Writing Baseball

  Jerome Klinkowitz

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  Slaughterhouse-Five: Reforming the Novel and the World

  Jerome Klinkowitz

  Provides in-depth analysis of the literary work Slaughterhouse-Five, as well as its importance and critical reception. Includes a chronology of the life and works of the author.--From the publisher.

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  The Art of Fact: Contemporary Artists of Nonfiction

  Barbara Lounsberry

  The artistry of nonfiction is the great unexplored territory of contemporary criticism. Although the American book clubs now emphasize nonfiction and The New York Times Book Review publishes almost three times as many reviews of nonfiction as fiction, critical appreciation of this work has lagged behind. The Art of Fact is the first comprehensive examination of five of today's most popular and important nonfiction artists: Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, John McPhee, Joan Didion, and Norman Mailer. By discussing contemporary literary nonfiction in relation to the early prose narrative forms and to the news/novels of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the opening chapter defines the discourse known as literary or artistic nonfiction. Dr. Lounsberry then describes four characteristics of literary nonfiction and grounds these characteristics in contemporary works. -- Provided by the publisher

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  Literarischer Nominalismus im Spätmittelalter: Eine Untersuchung zu Sprache, Charakterzeichnung und Struktur in Geoffrey Chaucers Troilus and Criseyde

  Richard Utz

  Innerhalb der philologischen Deutungen von Chaucers Troilus and Criseyde existieren eine Reihe kontrovers diskutierter Problemstände, etwa die proverbiale Redeweise des Pandarus, die Charakterzeichnungen der Criseyde und des Troilus oder die Spannungen zwischen der Haupthandlung und dem sogenannten Epilog. Bisherige methodische Ansätze, die meist auf Beobachtungen früh- und hochmittelalterlicher oder gar antiker Sprach- und Denktheorien basierten, konnten die erkannten Widersprüchlichkeiten keiner befriedigenden Lösung zuführen. Die diagnostizierte Defizienz vor allem allegorisch-exegetischer beziehungsweise boethianischer Erklärungsversuche wird in der vorliegenden Untersuchung durch die Konfrontation des literarischen Werkes mit einer ihm synchronen spätmittelalterlichen Kulturkonstituente, der philosophischen Denkbewegung des Nominalismus, überwunden. Das Einbringen dieser Folie des bestimmenden philosophischen Superstrats des 14. Jahrhunderts erhellt die spezifisch spätmittelalterliche Eigenart von Chaucers Werk. Die genannten Aporien der Forschung hinsichtlich Sprache, Charakterzeichnung und Struktur werden als Ausprägungen eines originellen, literarischen Nominalismus des Dichters erklärbar. -- Provided by publisher

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  Their Finest Hours: Narratives of the R.A.F. and Luftwaffe in World War II

  Jerome Klinkowitz

  From 1940 through the spring of 1945, the skies of England and Europe hosted an aerial combat unique in the history of warfare.--Amazon web site.

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  Rosenberg/Barthes/Hassan: The Postmodern Habit of Thought 

  Jerome Klinkowitz

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  Short Season and Other Stories

  Jerome Klinkowitz

  Each night, from April through August, up to a quarter of a million people in small towns and cities across America watch minor league baseball, experiencing the ups and downs of their local team -- every move, every player, every inning. Welcome to the world of Short Season. Meet the Mason City Royals. Live with the team for five months, across eight mid-western towns, with "no more than two days off from April through August and a night-long bus ride every three to six days." Join in the triumphs and misadventures of its collection of hopefuls and has-beens as they get to know each other in English and Spanish, admire baseball groupies, crisscross backroads propelled by a beery-eyed driver in a rattletrap bus, play cards, steal cars, get sent up and down, and somehow through it all play good enough ball to become the Class A champions. -- Provided by publisher

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  Kurt Vonnegut: A Comprehensive Bibliography

  Asa B. Pieratt, Julie Huffman-Klinkowitz, and Jerome Klinkowitz

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  The New American Novel of Manners: The Fiction of Richard Yates, Dan Wakefield, and Thomas McGuane

  Jerome Klinkowitz

  In the 1960s, as the underpinnings of society weakened, the traditional novel form seemed less suited to describe American reality. Theorists groped towards non-mimetic fiction as the tools that had sustained the novel since its birth—coherent characterization, linear plot, symbolism—became tools of New Journalism. The New American Novel of Manners explores the virtual reinvention of the novel of manners in America out of the same subjectivity that charged the works of New Journalism. In place of the rigid social structures that never seemed to depict America, novelists such as Richard Yates, Dan Wakefield, and Thomas McGuane located America’s modern-day manners in its semiotics, in the system of signs that envelops us—the blue jeans people wear, the fast food they eat, the décor of the bars they drink in and the rock-and-roll lyrics that play through memories. The new generation of mannerists describe lifestyles that are determined by words and images, by actions that are dictated by what has been read and seen, and patterns of behavior in which life is edited and fictionalized. Klinkowitz reveals a fiction that is once again capable of reflecting the way people live. -- Provided by publisher

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  Literary Subversion: New American Fiction and the Practice of Criticism

  Jerome Klinkowitz

  Klinkowitz’s comprehensive Introduc­tion provides the clearest, liveliest explo­ration to date of the technical and criti­cal developments in the art of the novel over the past two decades. Using a variety of approaches from po­lemic and lyric to personal witness, Klinkowitz discusses John Updike, Grace Paley, Robley Wilson, Ishmael Reed, John Gardner, Thomas McGuane, John Irving, Richard Yates, John Barth, Jerzy Kosinski, Dan Wakefield, and Tom Glynn. -- Provided by publisher

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  The Self-Apparent Word: Fiction as Language/Language as Fiction

  Jerome Klinkowitz

  “The novel is dead” was the cry of the 1960s, and so it was as an authoritative report concerning the world; but from that death, Klinkowitz argues, arose a form of writing that celebrates the crea­tive process, a narrative that is not about something but is something. Klinkowitz first characterizes the “modern” fiction of the earlier 20th cen­tury wherein the word fades into the background because the story line forms the essence of the fiction. Thus the word is “self-effacing.” Postmodern fiction, on the other hand, features the word. Words in postmodern fiction are opaque, not transparent. Of necessity we notice the word and must look closely at it; thus the word becomes “self-apparent.” -- Provided by publisher

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  Peter Handke and the Postmodern Transformation: The Goalie's Journey Home

  Jerome Klinkowitz and James Knowlton

  In 1966, Peter Handke disturbed the world of German letters with the publication of his first novel and with his attacks on the complacency of German-language writers and their audiences. Since then, Handke—an Austrian whose works include drama, poetry, and critical theory as well as fiction—has become a leading European figure in the internationally established postmodern movement. Klinkowitz and Knowlton survey Handke’s progress as a writer, concentrating on his novels, to determine whether his creativity has been exhausted by his persistent assault on the systems that underlie conventional fiction, drama, and poetry. By placing Handke’s work in the tradition of Gabriel García Márquez’s magic realism and Donald Barthelme’s innovative fictions, the authors demonstrate that postmodern writers can create works of art in which content is effaced and the process of composition assumes increasing importance. Indeed, in so doing, Handke has made that process as humanly interesting and as fictionally dramatic as any stories of The Great Tradition: he has learned to address the human condition within the limits of a rebellious aesthetic. The lesson of the postmodern transformation, Klinkowitz and Knowlton argue, is that the abstraction of content is not a loss; instead, it leads directly to the most essential human concerns. -- Provided by publisher

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  Kurt Vonnegut

  Jerome Klinkowitz

  Offers a profile of the American writer, discusses the main themes of each of his novels, and describes his place in modern literature.--Provided by publisher.

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  Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary American Fiction

  Jerome Klinkowitz

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  The American 1960's: Imaginative Acts in a Decade of Change

  Jerome Klinkowitz

  Looks at how politicians, writers, journalists, rock musicians, and, especially, Vietnam affected the culture of the sixties--Provided by publisher

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  The Practice of Fiction in America: Writers from Hawthorne to the Present

  Jerome Klinkowitz

  Traces the development of realism in U.S. fiction, looking closely at the work of Hawthorne, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Updike, and Vonnegut.

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  The Diaries of Willard Motley

  Willard Motley and Jerome Klinkowitz

  From 28 exhaustive volumes kept by Willard Motley from 1926 to 1943, Jerome Klinkowitz has selected a revealing self-portrait of an important American writer at work.

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  Writing Under Fire: Stories of the Vietnam War

  Jerome Klinkowitz and John L. Somer

  Fictional narratives depicting the experiences of American and Vietnamese characters demonstrate the horror and senselessness of war.

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  The Life of Fiction

  Jerome Klinkowitz and Roy R. Behrens

  "Applying a radically new style of criticism to the 'new fiction' of Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Donald Barthelme, Hunter S. Thompson, Ishmael Reed, Ronald Sukenick, Gilbert Sorrentino, and others." -- Provided by publisher

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  Vonnegut in America: An Introduction to the Life and Work of Kurt Vonnegut

  Jerome Klinkowitz and Donald L. Lawler

  This book containing original essays, Vonnegut's life from childhood until the published date of this book are discussed. -- Provided by publisher

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  Donald Barthelme: A Comprehensive Bibliography and Annotated Secondary Checklist

  Jerome Klinkowitz, Asa B. Pieratt, and Robert Murray Davis

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  Younger Critics of North America: Essays on Literature and the Arts

  Richard Kostelanetz and Jerome Klinkowitz

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  Literary Disruptions: Making of a Post-Contemporary American Fiction

  Jerome Klinkowitz

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  Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: A Descriptive Bibliography and Annotated Secondary Checklist

  Asa B. Pieratt and Jerome Klinkowitz

  First edition. Includes all facets of Vonnegut's work. Presentation from Asa Pieratt dated December 22, 1973 on title page. Prospectus also signed by Pieratt loosely inserted.

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  The Vonnegut Statement

  Jerome Klinkowitz and John L. Somer

  After twenty years of careful preparation as a writer, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. has emerged as a major American novelist whose books have sold in the millions. This volume contains fourteen original essays by various academic critics and novelists on all facets of Vonnegut's life and work which, taken together, offer the most complete and coherent picture of the writer's career. The book deals with Vonnegut as a public personage as well as a literary figure and assesses his literary achievement. Contributors include Dan Wakefield, Robert Scholes, Joe David Bellamy, James Mellard, Jess Ritter, and other well-known writers and critics. Jerome Klinkowitz has published essays on Hawthorne, Howells, Faulkner, and on numerous contemporary novelists. He teaches at the University of Northern Iowa. John Somer is the author of several textbooks on literature and composition, and is now preparing a book-length study of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. He is an assistant professor at Kansas State College. -- Provided by publisher

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  Innovative Fiction: Stories for the Seventies

  Jerome Klinkowitz and John L. Somer