Literary Studies

Cover of Pictorial Victorians

Pictorial VictoriansOn Sale

The Inscription of Values in Word and Image

By Julia Thomas

The Victorians were image obsessed. The middle decades of the nineteenth century saw an unprecedented growth in the picture industry. Technological advances enabled the Victorians to adorn with images the pages of their books and the walls of their homes.…

Cover of Pike’s Peak

Pike’s PeakOn Sale

Mining Saga

By Frank Waters

During the fabulous reign of Colorado Silver, innumerable prospectors passed by Pike’s Peak on their way to the silver strikes at Leadville, Aspen, and the boom camps in the Saguache, Sangre de Cristo, and San Juan mountain.…


Cover of The Poems of J. V. Cunningham

The Poems of J. V. Cunningham

Edited by Timothy Steele

The lifework in verse of one of the century's finest and liveliest American poets, this collection of the poems of J. V. Cunningham (1911-85) documents the poet's development from his early days as an experimental modernist during the Depression to his emergence as the master of the classical "plain style"--distinguished by its wit, feeling, and subtlety.…

Cover of Poems Old and New, 1918-1978

Poems Old and New, 1918-1978

By Janet Lewis

Kenneth Rexroth wrote: “Janet Lewis uses reason to veil and adorn the flesh of feeling and intuition. This is the way the greatest poetry has always been written.”The poems in this collection range over a period of 60 years.…


Cover of The Poetry of Resistance

The Poetry of Resistance

Seamus Heaney and the Pastoral Tradition

By Sidney Burris

Does the artist have a responsibility to mirror the conflicts and problems of society in his or her work? Perhaps more than most, the Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, has been faced with this question. Living in Belfast since 1957, Heaney decided to leave Northern Ireland altogether in 1972, his residency there spanning fifteen years of social upheaval and violence.…

Cover of A Poet’s Prose

A Poet’s ProseOn Sale

Selected Writings of Louise Bogan

By Mary Kinzie

Although best known as a master of the formal lyric poem, Louise Bogan (1897- 1970) also published fiction and what would now be called lyrical essays. A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan showcases her devotion to compression, eloquence, and sharp truths.…


Cover of Pompilia

Pompilia

A Feminist Reading of Robert Browning's The Ring and The Book

By Ann P. Brady

When Count Guido Franceschini was tried by a Roman court in 1698 for the rape and murder of his young wife Pompilia, he had the church, the state, and “all of sensible Rome” supporting him. Their cynical mandate sprang from the traditional belief that in a patriarchal society the male should wield absolute power, including the power of life and death, over the female.…

Cover of Power of Blackness

Power of Blackness

Hawthorne, Poe, Melville

By Harry Levin

The Power of Blackness is a profound and searching reinterpretation of Hawthorne, Poe and Melville, the three classic American masters of fiction. It is also an experiment in critical method, an exploration of the myth-making process by way of what may come to be known as literary iconology.…


Cover of Power Plays

Power Plays

Wayang Golek Puppet Theater of West Java

By Andrew N. Weintraub

Based on ethnographic fieldwork spanning twenty years, Power Plays is the first scholarly book in English on wayang golek, the Sundanese rod-puppet theater of West Java. It is a detailed and lively account of the ways in which performers of this major Asian theatrical form have engaged with political discourses in Indonesia.…

Cover of The Practical Shakespeare

The Practical Shakespeare

The Plays in Practice and on the Page

By Colin Butler

A comprehensive treatment of Shakespeare’s plays, The Practical Shakespeare: The Plays in Practice and on the Page illuminates for a general audience how and why the plays work so well. Noting in detail the practical and physical limitations the Bard faced as he worked out the logistics of his plays, Colin Butler demonstrates how Shakespeare incorporated those limitations and turned them to his advantage: his management of entrances and exits; his characterization techniques; his handling of scenes off-stage; his control of audience responses; his organization of major scenes; and his use of prologues and choruses.…


Cover of The Prisoner Pear

The Prisoner Pear

Stories from the Lake

By Elissa Minor Rust

The twelve stories in The Prisoner Pear: Stories from the Lake take place in an affluent suburb of Portland, Oregon, but they could be taken from any number of similar enclaves across the United States.…

Cover of Private Poets, Worldly Acts

Private Poets, Worldly ActsOn Sale

Public and Private History in Contemporary American Poetry

By Kevin Stein

At a time when poets appear tragically detached from the public for which they write, Kevin Stein persuasively demonstrates in Private Poets, Worldy Acts the way a particular group of diverse poets have manifested their communal concerns.…


Cover of Pure Waters

Pure WatersOn Sale

Frank Waters and the Quest for the Cosmic

By Frank Waters
Edited by Barbara Waters

The novels and nonfiction work of writer Frank Waters stand as a monument to his genius and to his lifetime quest to plumb the spiritual depths that he found for himself in the landscape and people of his beloved Southwest.…

Cover of The Quarry

The QuarryOn Sale

Poems

By Dan Lechay

Marvelous, disquieting, extraordinarily beautiful book that meditates on fundamental questions of time and change in and through a clear-eyed yet loving evocation of everyday existence. Once or twice in a generation a poet comes along who captures the essential spirit of the American Midwest and gives name to the peculiar nature that persists there.…


Cover of The Quick-Change Artist

The Quick-Change Artist

Stories

By Cary Holladay

In these stories of magic and memory, clustered around a resort hotel in a small Virginia community, Cary Holladay takes the reader on an excursion through the changes wrought by time on the community and its visitors.…

Cover of R. F. D.

R. F. D.On Sale

Charles Allen Smart

By Charles Allen Smart

"This book," the author tells us in his preface, "is intended to be a picture of life on a farm in Southern Ohio in the 1930s." It is a faithful portrait of farm life as thousands of men and women experienced it from one end of the country to the other and from pioneering times to the present century.…


Cover of Raising the Dust

Raising the DustOn Sale

The Literary Housekeeping of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman

By Beth Sutton-Ramspeck

Raising the Dust identifies a heretofore-overlooked literary phenomenon that author Beth Sutton-Ramspeck calls "literary housekeeping." The three writers she examines rejected turn-of-the-century aestheticism and modernism in favor of a literature that is practical, even ostensibly mundane, designed to "set the human household in order.…

Cover of Rare Book Lore

Rare Book Lore

Selections from the Letters of Ernest J. Wessen

By Ernest J. Wessen
Edited by Jack Matthews

Ernest J. Wessen was one of the legendary rare bookmen of the mid-twentieth century, and his letters, like his famous catalogs, Midland Notes, are a treasure of Americana. Wessen’s anecdotes of the chase, his wry comments upon collectors and fellow dealers (and, indeed, the world at large), his alternating moods of genial tolerance and peppery impatience with the scouts who brought him books and pamphlets…all combine to give a wonderfully informative, useful, and fascinating compendium of rare book lore — just as the title promises.…


Cover of Realist in the American Theatre

Realist in the American TheatreOn Sale

Selected Drama Cricism of William Dean Howells

By W.D. Howells

William Dean Howells has long been recognized as the chief spokesman for post-1880s American Realism. Most of his writing appeared in popular magazines, however, and has been lost to us. This collection brings together for the first time his most significant essays about American drama written between 1875 and 1919 and a full bibliography of his writings on drama and theatre.…

Cover of The Realm of Prester John

The Realm of Prester John

By Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg, whose work is well known to science fiction fans, originally published The Realm of Prester John in 1972. The first modern account of the genesis of a great medieval myth—which was perpetuated for centuries by European Christians who looked to Asia and Africa for a strong ruler out of the east—Silverberg's romantic and fabulous tale is now available in paperback for the first time.…



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