Literature titles sorted by release date (or by book title):
A Poet’s Prose
Selected Writings of Louise Bogan
By Mary KinzieAlthough 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.…
The Secret of the Hardy Boys
Leslie McFarlane and the Stratemeyer Syndicate
By Marilyn S. GreenwaldThe author of the Hardy Boys Mysteries was, as millions of readers know, Franklin W. Dixon. Except there never was a Franklin W. Dixon. He was the creation of Edward Stratemeyer, the savvy founder of a children's book empire that also published the Tom Swift, Bobbsey Twins, and Nancy Drew series.…
An American Vein
Critical Readings in Appalachian Literature
Edited by Danny L. Miller, Sharon Hatfield and Gurney NormanThe blossoming of Appalachian studies began some thirty years ago. Thousands of young people from the hills have since been made aware of their region's rich literary tradition through high school and college courses.…
Beyond Hill and Hollow
Original Readings in Appalachian Women’s Studies
By Elizabeth S. D. EngelhardtWomen’s studies unites with Appalachian studies in Beyond Hill and Hollow, the first book to focus exclusively on studies of Appalachia’s women. Featuring the work of historians, linguists, sociologists, performance artists, literary critics, theater scholars, and others, the collection portrays the diverse cultures of Appalachian women.…
The Confessions of Señora Francesca Navarro and Other Stories
By Natalie L. M. Petesch“Memory, of course, is sometimes like a bucking horse, sometimes a runaway one, and one must control the reins until finally it stops, snorting with exhausted relief,” writes Natalie L. M. Petesch in her haunting new collection, The Confessions of Señora Francesca Navarro and Other Stories.…
Power Plays
Wayang Golek Puppet Theater of West Java
By Andrew N. WeintraubBased 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.…
Raising the Dust
The Literary Housekeeping of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman
By Beth Sutton-RamspeckRaising 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.…
Inaugural Wounds
The Shaping of Desire in Five Nineteenth-Century English Narratives
By Robert E. LougyDesire, Jacques Lacan suggests, is a condition or expression of our wounded nature. But because such desire is also unconscious, it can be expressed only indirectly, for what we consciously desire is hardly ever what we really want.…
Switzerland
A Village History
By David BirminghamSwitzerland: A Village History is an account of an Alpine village that illuminates the broader history of Switzerland and its rural, local underpinnings. It begins with the colonization of the Alps by Romanized Celtic peoples who came from the plain to clear the wilderness, establish a tiny monastic house, and create a dairy economy that became famous for its cheeses.…
Subjects on Display
Psychoanalysis, Social Expectation, and Victorian Femininity
By Beth NewmanSubjects on Display explores a recurrent figure at the heart of many nineteenth-century English novels: the retiring, self-effacing woman who is conspicuous for her inconspicuousness. Beth Newman draws upon both psychoanalytic theory and recent work in social history as she argues that this paradoxical figure, who often triumphs over more dazzling, eye-catching rivals, is a response to the forces that made personal display a vexed issue for Victorian women.…
Mencken’s America
H. L. Mencken
Edited by S. T. JoshiLong famous as a political, social, and cultural gadfly, journalist and essayist H. L. Mencken was unafraid to speak his mind on controversial topics and to express his views in a deliberately provocative manner.…
The Quarry
Poems
By Dan LechayMarvelous, 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.…
Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation
By Julia M. WrightWilliam Blake’s reputation as a staunch individualist is based in large measure on his repeated attacks on institutions and belief systems that constrain the individual’s imagination. Blake, however, rarely represents isolation positively, suggesting that the individual’s absolute freedom from communal pressures is not the ideal.…
In the Work of Their Hands Is Their Prayer
Cultural Narrative and Redemption on the American Frontiers, 1830-1930
By Joel DaehnkeWestward expansion on the North American continent by European settlers generated a flurry of writings on the frontier experience over the course of a hundred years. Asserting that the dominant ideology of America's Manifest Destiny embodied a tense, often contradictory union of Christian and secular republican views of social progress, In the Work of Their Hands Is Their Prayer investigates the ambivalence of the frontier as it was inscribed with redemptive, historical significance by a host of frontier writers.…
The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature
By Elizabeth S. D. EngelhardtContemporaries were shocked when author Mary Noailles Murfree revealed she was a woman, but modern readers may be more surprised by her cogent discussion of community responses to unwanted development.…
Cast a Blue Shadow
An Ohio Amish Mystery
By P. L. Gaus“The author portrays the conflicts among the various Amish sects whose varying degrees of strictness in some instances cause them to shun each other. Eschewing any academic pedantry, Gaus manages to expertly enlighten as well as entertain.”—Publishers Weekly
One-Smoke Stories
Edited by Noreen Groover LapeBy Mary Austin
One-Smoke Stories is a collection of folk tales from Native American, Spanish Colonial, mestizo, and European American peoples of the Southwest retold in the enthralling words of one of the bestselling writers of her day, Mary Austin.…
Writing Women in Central America
Gender and the Fictionalization of History
By Laura Barbas-RhodenWhat 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.…
Shakespeare at the Cineplex
The Kenneth Branagh Era
By Samuel CrowlSamuel Crowl's Shakespeare at the Cineplex: The Kenneth Branagh Era is the first thorough exploration of the fifteen major Shakespeare films released since the surprising success of Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (1989).…
Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies
Women, Sexuality, and Religion in the Victorian Market
By Mary Wilson CarpenterOf the many literary phenomena that sprang up in eighteenth-century England and later became a staple of Victorian culture, one that has received little attention until now is the “Family Bible with Notes.…




















