Literary Criticism
Text/Politics in Island Southeast Asia – On Sale
Essays in Interpretation
How does the language of poetry conspire with the language of power? This question is at the heart of this volume which deals with Indonesia and the Philippines in the early modern and post-1945 periods.…
Thackeray and Slavery – On Sale
Slavery fascinated Thackeray. For him, the essence of slavery consisted of treating people like things. Thomas examines relationships in Thackeray’s fiction in which people have been reduced to objects and power is an end.…
Transcendental Wordplay – On Sale
America's Romantic Punsters and the Search for the Language of Nature
By Michael West
Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, America was captivated by a muddled notion of "etymology." New England Transcendentalism was only one outcropping of a nationwide movement in which schoolmasters across small-town America taught students the roots of words in ways that dramatized religious issues and sparked wordplay.…
Under Criticism – On Sale
Essays for William H. Pritchard
Edited by David Sofield and Herbert F. Tucker
American literary life has been enriched over the past generation by habits of criticism practiced at Amherst College during the tenure of William H. Pritchard. These essays, which were commissioned as a tribute to Pritchard, celebrate his fortieth year at Amherst and demonstrate the breadth of his influence in the fields of theory, criticism, and pedagogy.…
Value and Vision in American Literature – On Sale
Essays in Honor of Ray Lewis White
Edited by Joseph Candido
The widely divergent voices in this collection are united by their common interest in the American literary heritage and by their intention to redefine that heritage by altering our angle of vision or forcing us to re-examine some traditional values.…
Vernon Lee – On Sale
Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual
By Christa Zorn
The subject of renewed interest among literary and cultural scholars, Vernon Lee wrote more than forty books, in a broad range of genres, including fiction, history, aesthetics, and travel literature. Early on, Lee established her reputation as a public critic whose unconventional viewpoints stood out among those of her contemporaries.…
Victorian Authors and Their Works
Revision Motivations and Modes
These essays address a broad variety of issues faced by editors, textual critics, and others who are interested in the writing and revision processes involved in the development of literary texts. Individual chapters focus on the writing experiences of individual Victorian authors, such as Browning, Carlyle, Tennyson, Arnold, Henley, and Yeats; study the problems facing authors of texts that are transformed from serial-to-book versions like Conrad, Hardy, and Patmore; or explore the relationships between the composition and revision practices of artists who work in two modalities, the Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti and Morris, as well as Beatrix Potter, for example.…
Victorian Will
John R. Reed, author of Victorian Conventions, The Natural History of H.G. Wells, and Decadent Style, has published a new critical study examining nineteenth-century British attitudes toward free will, determinism, providence, and fate.…
Virginia Woolf
Reading the Renaissance
Edited by Sally Greene
The story of “Shakespeare’s sister” that Virginia Woolf tells in A Room of One’s Own has sparked interest in the question of the place of the woman writer in the Renaissance. By now, the process of recovering lost voices of early modern women is well under way.…
Windings of the Labyrinth
Quest and Structure in the Major Novels of Wilkie Collins
By Peter Thoms
Author of such feats of storytelling as The Woman in White and The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins has traditionally been recognized far more than for his accomplishments as a serious novelist.…
Wittgenstein and Critical Theory
Beyond Postmodern Criticism and Toward Descriptive Investigations
The crucial point of Brill’s study is that of fit: which critical methods prove most useful towards opening up which texts? Close investigations into the parameters of the language games of texts, critics, and methods enable us to determine which paths to take towards more complete descriptive analyses and critique.…
Womanist and Feminist Aesthetics – On Sale
A Comparative Review
Alice Walker’s womanist theory about black feminist identity and practice also contains a critique of white liberal feminism. This is the first in-depth study to examine issues of identity and difference within feminism by drawing on Walker’s notion of an essential black feminist consciousness.…
Word Play Place – On Sale
Essays on the Poetry of John Matthias
Edited by Robert Archambeau
The poetry of John Matthias has long been admired by other poets for the way it refuses to be categorized. Lyrical and experimental, cosmopolitan and rooted in place, it challenges our received notions of what poetry can be at the end of the twentieth century.…
Word Rides Again – On Sale
Rereading The Frontier In American Fiction
With much recent scholarship polarizing frontier novels into “popular” and “literary” camps, The Word Rides Again challenges the critical orthodoxy that such works have little in common, arguing instead that formulaic Western fictions can subtly (and even subversively) share cultural concerns with more highbrow brethren.…
Writing in Disguise – On Sale
Academic Life in Subordination
By Terry Caesar
Writing in Disguise is a series of increasingly personal essays that both discuss and dramatize through firsthand experience the significance of subordination in academic life, in terms of issues and structures but above all in terms of texts.…
Writing Women in Central America
Gender and the Fictionalization of History
What is the relationship between history and fiction in a place with a contentious past? And of what concern is gender in the telling of stories about that past? Writing Women in Central America explores these questions as it considers key Central American texts.…
Wuthering Heights
A Study
Wuthering Heights at once fascinates and frustrates the reader with the highly charged, passionate and problematic relationships it portrays. This study provides a key to the text by examining the temporal and narrative rhythms through which Brontë presents the dualities by which we commonly define our selfhood: child and adult, female and male, symbiosis and separateness, illogic and common sense, classlessness and classboundedness, play and power, free will and determinism.…
