Studies in Major Literary Authors features outstanding scholarship on celebrated and neglected authors of both canonical and lesser-known texts.
By Jamie Carr
August 12, 2014
This book maps Christopher Isherwood's intellectual and aesthetic reflections from the late 1930s through the late 1970s. Drawing on the queer theory of Eve Sedgwick and the ethical theory of Michel Foucault, Carr illuminates Isherwood's post-war development of a queer ethos through his ...
By Thomas Festa
August 12, 2014
This book shows that education constitutes the central metaphor of John Milton's political as well as his poetic writing. Demonstrating how Milton's theory of education emerged from his own practices as a reader and teacher, this book analyzes for the first time the relationship between Milton's ...
By Lance Callahan
July 17, 2014
In the Shadows of Divine Perfection provides an examination of Derek Walcott's Omeros 1990)- the St. Lucian poet's longest work, and the piece that secured his Nobel Laureate-that reveals the deep-seated bond between the root narratives of ancient Greece to the cultural products and practices of ...
By Lissa Schneider
June 09, 2014
In Joseph Conrad’s tales, representations of women and of "feminine" generic forms like the romance are often present in fugitive ways. Conrad’s use of allegorical feminine imagery, fleet or deferred introductions of female characters, and hybrid generic structures that combine features of "...
By Eunyoung Oh
June 09, 2014
D.H. Lawrence's Border Crossing builds upon developments within postcolonial theory to argue for a reconsideration of the concept of "spirit of place" in D. H. Lawrence’s travel books and "leadership" novels – works that record Lawrence’s various encounters with racial and geographical "others...
By Terry Baxter
June 09, 2014
This book attempts to answer a fundamental question: How did Douglass manage to persuade anyone about the evils of slavery, and even impress viewers with his personal qualities, when his speeches were commonly considered mere entertainment, in the same category as Barnum's circus acts? In answering...
By Jill Muller
June 09, 2014
This book restores the poet to his full intellectual and literary context as a Victorian convert to Catholicism....
By Rachel Wetzsteon
June 09, 2014
Influential Ghosts: A Study of Auden's Sources explores some of the most important literary and philosophical influences on W.H. Auden's poetry. The study attempts to show that Auden's poetry derives much of its interest from the vast range of authors on whom he drew for inspiration. But it also ...
By Laurie MacDiarmid
June 09, 2014
T. S. Eliot's Civilized Savage revisits this poet's drafts and canonical poetry in a sometimes dismissive critical arena . While contemporary readers emphasize Eliot's charged personal life, his anti-Semitism, his political conservatism, and his misogyny, Laurie MacDiarmid argues that although ...
By Ken Monteith
February 23, 2012
When H. P. Blavatsky, the controversial head of the turn of the century movement Theosophy, defined "a true Theosophist" in her book The Key to Theosophy, she could have just as easily have been describing W. B. Yeats. Blavatsky writes, "A true Theosophist must put in practice the loftiest moral ...
By Gordon A. Tapper
May 30, 2014
Examining how Crane's corporeal aesthetic informs poems written across the span of his career, The Machine That Sings focuses on four texts in which Crane's preoccupation with the body reaches its apoge. Tapper treats Voyages, The Wine Merchant, and Possessions as a triptych of erotic poems in ...
By Ian S. Maloney
January 14, 2014
Melville's Monumental Imagination explores the connection between the contested 19th century American monument tradition and one of the nation's most revered authors, Herman Melville (1819-1891). The book was written to fill a void in recent Melville scholarship. To date, there has not been a ...