Literary Criticism - Recent Titles from Ohio University Press

Indian Angles

Fri, 13 May 2011

Indian Angles (2011)
English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore

By Mary Ellis Gibson

In Indian Angles, Mary Ellis Gibson provides a new historical approach to Indian English literature. Gibson shows that poetry, not fiction, was the dominant literary genre of Indian writing in English until 1860 and that poetry written in colonial situations can tell us as much or even more about figuration, multilingual literacies, and histories of nationalism than novels can. Gibson recreates the historical webs of affiliation and resistance that were experienced by writers in colonial India—writers of British, Indian, and mixed ethnicities.

Advancing new theoretical and historical paradigms for reading colonial literatures, Indian Angles makes accessible many writers heretofore neglected or virtually unknown. Gibson recovers texts by British women, by non-elite British men, and by persons who would, in the nineteenth century, have been called Eurasian. Her work traces the mutually constitutive history of English language poets from Sir William Jones to Toru Dutt and Rabindranath Tagore. Drawing on contemporary postcolonial theory, her work also provides new ways of thinking about British internal colonialism as its results were exported to South Asia.

In lucid and accessible prose, Gibson presents a new theoretical approach to colonial and postcolonial literatures.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Indian+Angles.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Making Words Matter

Mon, 15 Jun 2009

Making Words Matter (2009)
The Agency of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature

By Ambreen Hai

Why should Salman Rushdie describe his truth telling as an act of swallowing impure “haram” flesh from which the blood has not been drained? Why should Rudyard Kipling cast Kim, the imperial child–agent, as a body/text written upon and damaged by empire? Why should E. M. Forster evoke through the Indian landscape the otherwise unspeakable racial or homosexual body in his writing? In Making Words Matter: The Agency of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Ambreen Hai argues that these writers focus self–reflectively on the unstable capacity of words to have material effects and to be censored, and that this central concern with literary agency is embedded in, indeed definitive of, colonial and postcolonial literature.

Making Words Matter contends that the figure of the human body is central to the self–imagining of the text in the world because the body uniquely concretizes three dimensions of agency: it is at once the site of autonomy, instrumentality, and subjection. Hai’s work exemplifies a new trend in postcolonial studies: to combine aesthetics and politics and to offer a historically and theoretically informed mode of interpretation that is sophisticated, lucid, and accessible.

This is the first study to identify and examine the rich convergence of issues and to chart their dynamic. Hai opens up the field of postcolonial literary studies to fresh questions, engaging knowledgeably with earlier scholarship and drawing on interdisciplinary theory to read both well known and lesser–known texts in a new light. It should be of interest internationally to students and scholars in a variety of fields including British, Victorian, modernist, colonial, or postcolonial literary studies, queer or cultural studies, South Asian studies, history, and anthropology.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Making+Words+Matter.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

On Poets and Poetry

Mon, 25 May 2009

On Poets and Poetry (2009)

By William H. Pritchard

William Pritchard’s collection of essays and reviews on poets and poetry ranges from Dryden and Milton through the major American and British poets of the last century. One of them, Philip Larkin, answered an interviewer’s question about what he had learned from his study of other poets by snapping back, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, one doesn’t study poets! You read them, and think: That’s marvelous; how is it done?” Although Pritchard has been talking with students about poets for more than fifty years, his practice in writing has Larkin’s question in mind: how to describe convincingly the way it’s done, the “marvelous” creations of Tennyson, Hardy, Yeats, Robert Lowell, or Larkin himself. Pritchard’s aim throughout is to address not only academics but the larger, intelligent audience of non-specialist readers who look to poetry for the surprise that is central to all imaginative literature.

Hugh Kenner, one of three twentieth-century critics of poetry treated in this book, once wrote that “the chief requisite for criticism is not analytic skill but a trained sensibility.” William Pritchard’s sensibility has been trained in the practice of attending to a poet’s style and voice—of what Robert Frost once called “ear-reading.” His endeavor is not to discover hidden, buried treasures (what the poem “really means”) but to engage with instances of measured language as they reveal themselves, in both the “timing” of individual poems and the historical time in which poets and poetry live.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/On+Poets+and+Poetry.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Making a Man

Wed, 01 Apr 2009

Making a Man (2009)
Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

By Gwen Hyman

Gruel and truffles, wine and gin, opium and cocaine. Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel addresses the role of food, drink, and drugs in the conspicuously consuming nineteenth century in order to explore the question of what makes a man of a certain class in novels of the period. Gwen Hyman analyzes the rituals of dining room, drawing room, opium den, and cocaine lab, and the ways in which these alimentary behaviors make, unmake, and remake the gentlemanly body.

Making a Man makes use of food history and theory, literary criticism, anthropology, gender theory, economics, and social criticism to read gentlemanly consumers from Mr. Woodhouse, the gruel eater in Jane Austen's Emma, through the vampire and the men who hunt in Bram Stoker's Dracula. In Anne Brontë's Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit, Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Wilkie Collins's Law and the Lady, Hyman contends, the gentleman is delineated and revealed through his cravings, his feasting and fasting. Hyman argues that appetite is a crucial means of casting light on the elusive identity of the gentleman, a figure who is the embodiment of power and yet is hardly embodied in Victorian literature.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Making+a+Man.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Praising It New

Tue, 15 Apr 2008

Praising It New (2008)
The Best of the New Criticism

Edited by Garrick Davis

Marked by a rigorously close textual reading, detached from biographical or other extratextual material, New Criticism was the dominant literary theory of the mid-twentieth century. Since that time, schools of literary criticism have arisen in support of or in opposition to the approach advocated by the New Critics. Nonetheless, the theory remains one of the most important sources for groundbreaking criticism and continues to be a controversial approach to reading literature.

Praising It New is the first anthology of New Criticism to be printed in fifty years. It includes important essays by such influential poets and critics as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Yvor Winters, Cleanth Brooks, R. P. Blackmur, W. K. Wimsatt, and Robert Penn Warren. Together, these authors ushered in the modernist age of poetry and criticism and transformed the teaching of literature in the schools. As the American poet and critic Randall Jarrell once noted: “I do not believe there has been another age in which so much extraordinarily good criticism of poetry has been written.”

This anthology now makes much of the best American poetry criticism available again, and includes short biographies and selected bibliographies of its chief figures. Praising It New is the perfect introduction for students to the best American poetry criticism of the twentieth century.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Praising+It+New.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson

Fri, 15 Jun 2007

Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson (2007)
Travel, Narrative, and the Colonial Body

By Oliver S. Buckton

Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson: Travel, Narrative, and the Colonial Body is the first booklength study about the influence of travel on Robert Louis Stevenson’s writings, both fiction and nonfiction. Within the contexts of late-Victorian imperialism and ethnographic discourse, the book offers original close readings of individual works by Stevenson while bringing new theoretical insights to bear on the relationship between travel, authorship, and gender identity in the Victorian fin de siècle.

Oliver S. Buckton develops “cruising” as a critical term, linking Stevenson’s leisurely mode of travel with the striking narrative motifs of disruption and fragmentation that characterize his writings. Buckton traces the development of Stevenson’s career from his early travel books to show how Stevenson’s major works of fiction, such as Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Ebb-Tide, draw on innovative techniques and materials Stevenson acquired in the course of his global travels.

Exploring Stevenson’s pivotal role in the revival of “romance” in the late nineteenth century, Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson highlights Stevenson’s treatment of the human body as part of his resistance to realism, arguing that the energies and desires released by travel are often routed through disturbingly resistant or darkly comic corporeal figures. Buckton gives extensive attention to Stevenson’s writing about the South Seas, arguing that his groundbreaking critiques of European colonialism are formed in awareness of the fragility and desirability of Polynesian bodies and island landscapes.

Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson will be indispensable to all admirers of Stevenson as well as of great interest to readers of travel writing, Victorian ethnography, gender studies, and literary criticism.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Cruising+with+Robert+Louis+Stevenson.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Wed, 10 May 2006

The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (2006)
A Dual-Text Critical Edition

Edited by Shawn St. Jean

Scholars have argued for decades over which constitutes the best possible version of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s frequently anthologized story “The Yellow Wall-Paper.”

Most editions have been based on the 1892 New England Magazine publication rather than the handwritten manuscript at Radcliffe College. Publication of the unedited manuscript in 1994 sparked controversy over which of the two was definitive. Since then, scholars have discovered half a dozen parent texts for later twentieth-century printings, including William Dean Howells’s version from 1920 and the 1933 Golden Book version.

While traditional critical editions gather evidence and make an argument for adopting one text as preferable to others,“The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Dual-Text Critical Edition, edited by Shawn St. Jean, offers both manuscript and magazine versions, critically edited and printed in parallel for the first time. New significance appears in such facets as the magazine’s accompanying illustrations, its lineation and paragraphing, Gilman’s choice of pronouns, and her original handwritten ending.

This critical edition of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” includes a full and nontraditional apparatus, making it easy for students and scholars to study the more than four hundred variants between the two texts. Four new essays, written especially for this volume, explore the implications of this multitext model.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Yellow+Wall-Paper+by+Charlotte+Perkins+Gilman.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

The Midwestern Pastoral

Wed, 15 Feb 2006

The Midwestern Pastoral (2006)
Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland

By William Barillas

The midwestern pastoral is a literary tradition of place and rural experience that celebrates an attachment to land that is mystical as well as practical, based on historical and scientific knowledge as well as personal experience. It is exemplified in the poetry, fiction, and essays of writers who express an informed love of the nature and regional landscapes of the Midwest.

Drawing on recent studies in cultural geography, environmental history, and mythology, as well as literary criticism, The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland relates Midwestern pastoral writers to their local geographies and explains their approaches. William Barillas treats five important Midwestern pastoralists—Willa Cather, Aldo Leopold, Theodore Roethke, James Wright, and Jim Harrison—in separate chapters. He also discusses Jane Smiley, U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, Paul Gruchow, and others.

For these writers, the aim of writing is not merely intellectual and aesthetic, but democratic and ecological. In depicting and promoting commitment to local communities, human and natural, they express their love for, their understanding of, and their sense of place in the American Midwest. Students and serious readers, as well as scholars in the growing field of literature and the environment, will appreciate this study of writers who counter alienation and materialism in modern society.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Midwestern+Pastoral.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Bleak Houses

Tue, 15 Nov 2005

Bleak Houses (2005)
Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction

By Lisa Surridge

The Offenses Against the Person Act of 1828 opened magistrates' courts to abused working-class wives. Newspapers in turn reported on these proceedings, and in this way the Victorian scrutiny of domestic conduct began. But how did popular fiction treat “private” family violence? Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction traces novelists' engagement with the wife-assault debates in the public press between 1828 and the turn of the century.

Lisa Surridge examines the early works of Charles Dickens and reads Dombey and Son and Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in the context of the intense debates on wife assault and manliness in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Surridge explores George Eliot's Janet's Repentance in light of the parliamentary debates on the 1857 Divorce Act. Marital cruelty trials provide the structure for both Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and Anthony Trollope's He Knew He Was Right.

Locating the New Woman fiction of Mona Caird and the reassuring detective investigations of Sherlock Holmes in the context of late-Victorian feminism and the great marriage debate in the Daily Telegraph, Surridge illustrates how fin-de-siècle fiction brought male sexual violence and the viability of marriage itself under public scrutiny. Bleak Houses thus demonstrates how Victorian fiction was concerned about the wife-assault debates of the nineteenth century, debates which both constructed and invaded the privacy of the middle-class home.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Bleak+Houses.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Absent Man

Thu, 06 Oct 2005

Absent Man (2005)
The Narrative Craft of Charles W. Chesnutt

By Charles Duncan

As the first African-American fiction writer to achieve a national reputation, Ohio native Charles W. Chesnutt (1858—1932) in many ways established the terms of the black literary tradition now exemplified by such writers as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Charles Johnson.

Following the highly autobiographical nonfiction produced by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and other slave narrative writers, Chesnutt's complex, multi-layered short fiction transformed the relationship between African-American writers and their readers. But despite generous praise from W. D. Howells and other important critics of his day, and from such prominent readers as William L. Andrews, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Eric Sundquist in ours, Chesnutt occupies a curiously ambiguous place in American literary history.

In The Absent Man, Charles Duncan demonstrates that Chesnutt's uneasy position in the American literary tradition can be traced to his remarkable narrative subtlety. Profoundly aware of the delicacy of his situation as a black intellectual at the turn of the century, Chesnutt infused his work with an intricate, enigmatic artistic vision that defies monolithic or unambiguously political interpretation, especially with regard to issues of race and identity that preoccupied him throughout his career.

In this first book-length study of the innovative short fiction, Duncan devotes particular attention to elucidating these sophisticated narrative strategies as the grounding for Chesnutt's inauguration of a tradition of African-American fiction.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Absent+Man.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.