Literary Studies Book List · 
Literary Studies titles sorted by release date (or by book title):
The Heritage
A Daughter's Memoir of Louis Bromfield
By Ellen Bromfield GeldLouis Bromfield, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, established one of the most significant homesteads in Ohio on his Malabar Farm. Today it receives thousands of visitors a year from all over the world; once the site of the wedding of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, it was a successful prototype of experimental and conservation farming.…
Mountain Dialogues
By Frank Waters“Mysticism is peculiar to the mountainbred,” Frank Waters once told an interviewer for Psychology Today. And in Mountain Dialogues, available for the first time in paperback, the mountainbred Waters proves it true.…
Soliloquy of a Farmer’s Wife
The Diary of Annie Elliott Perrin
Edited by Dale B. J. RandallSoliloquy of a Farmer's Wife is the bare-bones diary of a Geneva, Ohio, farmer's wife, Annie Perrin, who wrote during the last three weeks of 1917 and all of 1918, that is, during the final battles, climax, and close of World War I.…
Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China 1842-1907
By Susan Shoenbauer ThurinThree men and three women: a plant collector, a merchant and his novelist wife, a military officer, and two famous women travelers went to China between the Opium War and the formal end of the opium trade, 1842-1907.…
The Culture of Christina Rossetti
Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts
Edited by Mary Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison and Lorraine Janzen KooistraThe Culture of Christina Rossetti explores a “new” Christina Rossetti as she emerges from the scrutiny of the particular historical and cultural context in which she lived and wrote. The essays in this collection demonstrate how the recluse, saint, and renunciatory spinster of former studies was in fact an active participant in her society's attempt to grapple with new developments in aesthetics, theology, science, economics, and politics.…
Virginia Woolf
Reading the Renaissance
Edited by Sally GreeneThe 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.…
Blood of the Prodigal
An Ohio Amish Mystery
By P. L. Gaus“No one who enjoys a fresh approach to the mystery novel, plus an insider’s look at Ohio’s Old Order Amish culture, should miss Blood of the Prodigal. P. L. Gaus gives us a kind, gentle, and intriguing look at crime inside Ohio’s famous Amish colony.”—Tony Hillerman
A Woman of the Times
Journalism, Feminism, and the Career of Charlotte Curtis
By Marilyn S. GreenwaldA biography of a conflicted feminist and a tough reporter For twenty-five years, Charlotte Curtis was a society/women's reporter and editor and an op-ed editor at the New York Times. As the first woman section editor at the Times, Curtis was a pioneering journalist and one of the first nationwide to change the nature and content of the women's pages from fluffy wedding announcements and recipes to the more newsy, issue-oriented stories that characterize them today.…
All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing
An Explanation of Meter and Versification
By Timothy SteelePerfect for the general reader of poetry, students and teachers of literature, and aspiring poets, All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing is a lively and comprehensive study of versification by one of our best contemporary practitioners of traditional poetic forms.…
Battle of Kosovo
By John Matthias and Vladeta VuckovicThe Battle of Kosovo cycle of heroic ballads is generally considered the finest work of Serbian folk poetry. Commemorating the Serbian Empire’s defeat at the hands of the Turks in the late fourteenth century, these poems and fragments have been known for centuries in Eastern Europe.…
With Gissing in Italy
The Memoirs of Brian Ború Dunne
Edited by Paul F. Mattheisen, Arthur C. Young and Pierre CoustillasA candid portrait of one of England's most celebrated authors In 1897, at age nineteen, American Brian Ború Dunne was an aspiring journalist, who chanced to meet the Englishman George Gissing at the height of his career as a novelist.…
Es’kia Mphahlele
Themes of Alienation and African Humanism
By Ruth Obee“If you really want to understand South Africa, read black African writers. Read Es'kia Mphahlele,” is the advice proffered to diplomats and scholars by professor and publisher Donald Herdeck.…
The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XVI
With Variant Readings and Annotations
Edited by Susan Crowl, Roma A. King and Jr.By Robert Browning
Robert Browning wrote Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day in his seventy-third year. The work is a capstone to the poet's long career, encompassing autobiography as well as influences bearing on the poet's life and career and on Victorian thought and culture in general.…
Ruskin’s Mythic Queen
Gender Subversion in Victorian Culture
By Sharon Aronofsky WeltmanJohn Ruskin's prominence as the author of “Of Queen's Gardens,” his principal statement of Victorian gender opposition, makes him an ideal example for analyzing the power of mythic discourse to undermine gender division.…
A Paris Year
Dorothy and James T. Farrell, 1931–1932
By Edgar Marquess BranchThe Depression that follows the 1929 stock market crash is emptying Paris of many American expatriates. Two exceptions are Dorothy and James T. Farrell, the naïve young couple who have fled their home in Chicago for the fabled liberation that Paris seems to offer.…
Shakespeare in Production
Whose History?
By H. R. CoursenShakespeare in Production examines a number of plays in context. Included are the 1936 Romeo and Juliet, unpopular with critics of filmed Shakespeare, but very much a “photoplay” if its time; the opening sequences of filmed Hamlets which span more than seventy years; The Comedy of Errors on television, where production of this script is almost impossible; and the Branagh Much Ado About Nothing, a “popular” film discussed in the context of comedy as a genre.…
Voices from the Silence
Guatemalan Literature of Resistance
Edited by Marc Zimmerman and Raúl RojasThe conquest, colonization, independence, the liberal reforms, the regimes, revolution, and dictatorships, the insurrections and ongoing peace dialogues all are combined in a narrative projecting the most important forces in Guatemalan history from the Mayan period to our own times.…
Word Play Place
Essays on the Poetry of John Matthias
Edited by Robert ArchambeauThe 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.…
Kwame Nkrumah
The Father of African Nationalism
By David BirminghamThe first African statesman to achieve world recognition was Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972), who became president of the new Republic of Ghana in 1960. He campaigned ceaselessly for African solidarity and for the liberation of southern Africa from white settler rule.…
The Watchers
By Memye Curtis TuckerIn the world of Memye Curtis Tucker's poetry, the observed are on display, on trial, on guard, or disappearing, and often changed by the eyes upon them; the gazers are benevolent, threatening, judgmental, separate, invisible.…
