English Department Books

All We Know: Three Lives

Lisa Cohen — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 10:39:04 PDT

Esther Murphy was a brilliant New York intellectual who dazzled friends and strangers with an unstoppable flow of conversation. But she never finished the books she was contracted to write—a painful failure and yet a kind of achievement. The quintessential fan, Mercedes de Acosta had intimate friendships with the legendary actresses and dancers of the twentieth century. Her ephemeral legacy lies in the thousands of objects she collected to preserve the memory of those performers and to honor the feelings they inspired. An icon of haute couture and a fashion editor of British Vogue, Madge Garland held bracing views on dress that drew on her feminism, her ideas about modernity, and her love of women. Existing both vividly and invisibly at the center of cultural life, she—like Murphy and de Acosta—is now almost completely forgotten. In All We Know, Lisa Cohen describes these women’s glamorous choices, complicated failures, and controversial personal lives with lyricism and empathy. At once a series of intimate portraits and a startling investigation into style, celebrity, sexuality, and the genre of biography itself, All We Know explores a hidden history of modernism and pays tribute to three compelling lives.

Spurki Mech

Kachig Tololyan — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 08:58:08 PDT

The Crater

Richard Slotkin — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 08:58:06 PDT

The Crater recreates, with panoramic scope, a substantial setback in the Army of the Potomac's efforts to end the American Civil War decisively. On July 30th, 1864, during the siege of Petersburg, Union troops clandestinely dug a 500-foot tunnel under Confederate lines and detonated enough gunpowder to leave a 100-foot gap in their defenses. Yet the subsequent Union assault failed; the few soldiers who trickled into the crater (many African-American) were mercilessly shelled to death in what one witness called "a cauldron of Hell." The siege continued, and the war dragged on for another eight and a half months. Emphasizing the points of view of what seems like all the men who took part in the ill-fated endeavor, Slotkin paints a vast, detailed portrait not only of the "Battle of the Crater," but the whole spectrum of mid-19th-century American society. Freed slaves, Jewish jay hawkers, "Molly Maguires" (Irish Pennsylvanian coal miners), northern industrialists, and generals and commanders on both sides all jostle for attention in this painstakingly elaborate literary reenactment, although the use of flashbacks and the prodigious inclusion of military communiques slows the novel's pace somewhat. Most Civil War novels concern themselves ultimately with the reconciliation of the American republic; The Crater focuses on the bleaker issues of race and class which defined the remainder of the 19th century. From its meticulous depiction of Irish-Yankee antagonism during the tunnel's construction to the needless sacrifice (and subsequent scapegoating) of black troops in battle, the novel portrays the War between the States not as the end of the sectional crisis, but as the beginning of a socially divisive industrial order. --John M. Anderson

Woman of Letters: The Life of Virginia Woolf

Phyllis Rose — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 08:58:04 PDT

"My very simple idea was that being a woman was important to Woolf and that this had affected the writing of her novels"

Phyllis Rose

Shaw’s Moral Vision: The Self and Salvation

Alfred Turco — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 08:58:02 PDT

English in America: A Radical View of the Profession

Richard Ohmann — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 08:57:59 PDT

When it first appeared in 1976, this groundbreaking exploration of the influences of capitalism on the profession of English touched a nerve among educators and inspired Library Journal to declare, "This book should be read by all thoughtful Americans." Now, 20 years later, in a substantial new introduction that recontextualizes the book, Richard Ohmann addresses the critical furor over its initial publication, evaluates his own arguments in the aftermath of the Cold War, and locates the profession of English in the thick of the hotly contested culture wars. A remarkably prescient book whose claims have withstood two decades of fierce debate, English in America is widely considered to be as relevant today as ever. Wise, witty, and urbane, it has much to teach all students of English. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860

Richard Slotkin — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 08:57:57 PDT

In Regeneration Through Violence, the first of his trilogy on the mythology of the American West, Richard Slotkin shows how the attitudes and traditions that shape American culture evolved from the social and psychological anxieties of European settlers struggling in a strange new world to claim the land and displace the Native Americans. Using the popular literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries-including captivity narratives, the Daniel Boone tales, and the writings of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville-Slotkin traces the full development of this myth.

Faulkners Narrative

Joseph Reed — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 08:57:55 PDT

English Biography in the Early Nineteenth Century, 1801-1838

Joseph Reed — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 08:57:53 PDT

Shaw: The Style and the Man

Richard Ohmann — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 08:57:51 PDT

SHAW is one of those writers, like Browne, Johnson, Carlyle, and James, whose styles make patent special claims for attention. In reading one of these authors we intuitively feel style to be more than incidentally important: when manner stands out so persistently and so idiosyncratically it is sensible to ask why. That "why" is best taken as a request to be shown other char- acteristics of the writer that make it seem inevitable for him to have precisely his style and no other. We want an explanation, but the farthest that literary study can go toward giving one is to say: "This fact about Shaw, and this fact, and this other all belong together, and they illuminate each other when so re- garded. Although they may seem independent, possibly even contradictory, they make sense together under the rubric of this or that more inclusive truth about Shaw." Understanding of this sort is what I shall be looking for in the pages that follow.

—From the Introduction.

Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages

Phyllis Rose — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 09:31:23 PDT

In her study of the married couple as the smallest political unit, Phyllis Rose uses as examples the marriages of five Victorian writers who wrote about their own lives with unusual candor.

Balzac, James, and the Realistic Novel

William W. Stowe — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 09:31:18 PDT

One can say . . . that Stowe has written a virtually error-free, accomplished book, worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as Mimesis, The Implied Reader, and The Act of Reading. - Melvin J. Friedman

Three American Originals: John Ford, William Faulkner, and Charles Ives

Joseph Reed — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 09:31:10 PDT

Writing of Women: Essays in a Renaissance

Phyllis Rose — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 09:31:03 PDT

New beliefs require new facts, and the political ferment of the sixties, including the new feminism, began to change the way we look at 'fact, ' at what is worth discussing and what is not, at what is major and what is minor. It began an exciting time of reassessment in literary studies. This book is a product of that time, and the reviews of which it is largely composed were a small part of the process of revaluation which I celebrate. - from Introduction by the author.

The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890

Richard Slotkin — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 12:55:29 PDT

In The Fatal Environment, Richard Slotkin demonstrates how the myth of frontier expansion and subjugation of the Indians helped to justify the course of America’s rise to wealth and power. Using Custer’s Last Stand as a metaphor for what Americans feared might happen if the frontier should be closed and the "savage" element be permitted to dominate the "civilized," Slotkin shows the emergence by 1890 of a myth redefined to help Americans respond to the confusion and strife of industrialization and imperial expansion.fIn The Fatal Environment, Richard Slotkin demonstrates how the myth of frontier expansion and subjugation of the Indians helped to justify the course of Americas Last Stand as a metaphor for what Americans feared might happen if the frontier should be closed and the "savage" element be permitted to dominate the "civilized," Slotkin shows the emergence by 1890 of a myth redefined to help Americans respond to the confusion and strife of industrialization and imperial expansion.

Politics of Letters

Richard Ohmann — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 12:55:25 PDT

These essays by a Marxist critic who teaches English at Wesleyan range widely over mass culture. Advertising, to Ohmann, is an endless monologue extolling consumption and social climbing, while ads reinforce the domination of American life by corporations. One penetrating essay links the growth of popular magazines to their support from the advertising industry. Another iconoclastic piece argues that the computer has become a tool to control and "de-skill" workers, its liberating potential largely subverted by corporate agendas. Ohmann persuasively reads Salinger's Catcher in the Rye as a critique of class privilege, of culture as a badge of superiority. He examines the way TV trivializes political elections; looks at schools as conveyor-belts utilized to train a docile workforce; criticizes textbooks for subliminally discouraging students' inquisitiveness; and describes how writing classes could be restructured to encourage pupils to listen and think.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The Return of Henry Starr

Richard Slotkin — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 12:55:22 PDT

Our mythologizing of the Old West is the theme of this epic novel about an Oklahoma outlaw who eventually immortalizes his own career in the silent movies. The eponymous hero Henry Starr, half-Cherokee nephew of Belle Starr and grandson of one of the last great Indian leaders, nourishes his imagination on dime novels celebrating the exploits of historic desperados like Jesse James and on tales of the golden age of the Cherokee nation and its defiance of the white man. But, coming of age at the turn-of-the-century, he sees the Cherokees broken in spirit and prey to vindictive government agents and greedy white landowners and bankers. Inspired by his criminal ancestors, his reading and his anger at abuses of the Indian, Starr embarks on a bankrobbing spree that earns him status as a legend. As the story opens, Starr is in prison waiting to be hanged. He is released, though, and many years later, wins fame as the star of a silent-film series based on his criminal career. While imaginatively reliving his past, Starr becomes victim of his own mystique to the point where he "couldn't see clearly where the made-up parts left off and the life began." Pursued by the ghosts of his past, he resumes his earlier criminal vocation. Historian Slotkin (The Crater) renders sharply observed period detail and speech in a rich, often lyrical prose especially engaging for history buffs. Although slow-moving, this lengthy saga is certainly provocative in the way it explores the siren song of our frontier myths.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

American Scenarios: The Uses of Film Genre

Joseph Reed — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 12:55:18 PDT

Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time

Phyllis Rose — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 14:02:12 PDT

Josephine Baker's fascinating life encompassed stardom in the Paris of the 1920s, a career in the French Resistance, and civil rights activism in the '50s and '60s. Rose brings Baker to life as a performer, as a cultural icon, and as a black woman in a white world.

The Ends of History: Victorians and “The Woman Question"

Christina Crosby — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 14:02:09 PDT

The Victorians' passion for history was equalled perhaps only by their fascination with "woman", manifested as a ceaseless posing of "the woman question". In this book Christina Crosby argues that each of these obsessions entails the other, that the construction of middle-class Victorian "man" as the universal subject of history necessitated the placing of "woman" as an entity before, beyond, above or below history. In a discussion of key Victorian novels and non-literary texts, Crosby demonstrates the intermeshing of "history" and "the woman question". Her investigations range from philosophy and the philosophical novel - "Daniel Deronda" and Hegel's "Philosophy of History" - to the historical novel and the writing of history "proper" - "Henry Esmond" and Macauley's "History of England", from melodrama and social studies - Wilkie Collins' "The Frozen Deep", "Little Dorrit" and Henry Mayhew's "History of the People" to theology, aesthetics and autobiographical fiction - "Villette" , Patrick Fairbairn's "The Typology of Scripture" and Ruskin's "Modern Painters". This book should be of interest to students and teachers of English literature, social history and women's studies.