Associated University Presses
Anatomy of perjury; Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, Via Rasella, and the GINNY mission.
Raiber enlisted in the Marine Corps at age 17, and saw action at Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and Saipan with the Second Marine Division. His lifelong interest in the events of WWII led him to investigate a mystery that has perplexed historians for decades: inconsistent historical accounts about German Field Marshall Albert Kesselring and his role in the execution of American prisoners of war. Raiber's research shows that Kesselring's subordinates perjured themselves at Nuremberg to support the field marshal's testimony at his 1947 trial. A few b&w historical photos are included. The book is distributed in the US by Associated University Press. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The anxiety of dispossession; jealousy in nineteenth-century French culture.
Belenky (French, George Washington U.) considers jealously as a manifestation of a culture in crisis over different forms of social change, including the emergence of bourgeois values, mutating conceptions of marriage, revisions of family law and martial practices, and new questions surrounding constructions of masculinity. Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Bessie Head; the road of peace of mind; a critical appreciation.
South African author Bessie Head wrote novels and short stories that reflected the life of native Africans under Apartheid. Studies of her work have concentrated on how her experiences formed her literature. Johnson (English, Delaware State University, emerita) instead studies Head's work in search of her literary influences. Like most writers, Head was first a reader. Johnson finds traces of nineteenth century gothic novels and early feminist literature as well as Plato, Coleridge and Yeats. She demonstrates how this wide reading along with Head's own awareness of the mutability of the creative process informed her fiction. Head wrote from her own life and culture but her self-perception as a writer grew from a belief in the universality of the writing process. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Body [in] parts; bodies and identity in Sade and Guibert.
Partly in order to introduce English readers to Hervé Guibert, Orban (DePaul U., Chicago) examines how the late-20th-century French novelist drew both general ideas about human bodies and specific images of them from his predecessor the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814). Her topics include sexual performance, hiding and seeking to pass the time, and ghostly remains. Quotations are in English. Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Byron; the image of the poet.
This is the first collection of academic papers published on Lord Byron and the visual concept of Byronism, and editor Jones (King's College, London) manages many contributions on the subject of how Byron tried to influence and control other artistic mediums through his poetry. Byron the man is also shown in stark contrast to his somewhat mythical persona through paintings, drawings, sculpture and even modern film. This brief but enthusiastic volume should appeal to anyone interested in the poetry of Byron, but excludes more casual audiences. Distributed by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Caricature unmasked; irony, authenticity, and individualism in eighteenth-century English prints.
Rauser (art history, Franklin & Marshall College, US) writes an authoritative book on the caricature in eighteenth-century English prints. Illustrated throughout with appropriate and informative examples, the book is written in five sections: emblematism and ideal publicness, character or caricature, caricature and authenticity (artifice, masculinity and the Macaroni), caricature and individualism (crisis in representation), and caricature and irony (aestheticism, embodiment and subjectivity.) An epilogue focuses on the Englishness of caricature in Revolutionary France. Written expertly and interestingly, this title will prove valuable to not only students and scholars of art history but also to social historians of Britain and France. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Claiming Cambria; invoking the Welsh in the romantic era.
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, explains Lichtenwalner (English, East Tennessee State U.), Welsh intellectuals acquired a new interest in their national history and literature after a long period of treating it with indifference or even shame. She describes such aspects of this early Celtic revival as textual fidelity and critical failure, nostalgia and incorporation in Thomas Gray and Robert Southey, re-imaging the Druid, and Eisteddfodau. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Dial "M" for mother; a Freudian Hitchcock.
Gordon (comparative literature, U. of Colorado, Boulder) offers an examination of several of Alfred Hitchcock's major films from two perspectives: Freudian psychoanalysis and their latent psychosexual content. The focus is on the mother figure and her variations in his films. The author does not dismiss or ignore previously written formalist treatments of Hitchcock, but concerns himself primarily with the latent content of his films and the relationship of those films to one another. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The end of the world as they knew it; writing experiences of the Argentine South.
Jagoe (U. of Toronto) provides a compelling account of life in southern Argentina, concentrating primarily on writings from Sarmiento, Mansilla, Moreno and Borges to fashion a social document of the liberal ideologies of the region. Using specific historical incidents such as the 1871 Conquest of the Desert and the Argentinian military regime in the 1970s, the author shows how geography and social identity are linked. A fascinating read for students of Argentinian culture. Distributed by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Epic, empire, and community in the Atlantic world; Silvestre de Balboa's Espejo de paciencia.
The epic poem Espejo de paciencia, written in 1608 by Silvestre de Balboa, is the topic of this publication; Marrero-Fente (Spanish, U. of Minnesota) argues that the disappearance of this poem's manuscript in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not stop the poetic world described in the poem from founding a plethora of possibilities in Cuban literature. Discussion includes the epic ghost and colonial studies, epic poetry and the Hispanic Atlantic, and then, in connection with Espejo de paciencia: the invention of Cuban literature, myth and nature, and the poetics of community in the poem. Pertinent sections of the poem are presented both in their original Spanish and in English translation (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Everyday revolutions; eighteenth-century women transforming public and private.
US scholars of literature find evidence for how women negotiated the divide between private and public during the 18th century. Their topics include Mary Collier's demystification of work and womanhood, prostitutes in memoir novels in France, and displacement and the public sphere in Jane Austin's Mansfield Park. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Félicité de Genlis; motherhood in the margins.
Educator, society actress, musician, and prolific author, Genlis (1746-1830) was born into impoverished gentry, but rose into high society, weathered the pesky Revolution, and lived out her life as the duchess of Chartres. For all her talents, says Robb (French, U. of Delaware), she was always first and foremost a mother, and wrote at length not only about her own experience, but also about motherhood and the role of mothers in society. The texts she examines consider motherhood in various contexts and include marginal genres of sentimental and historical novels. Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Henry Fielding (1707-1754); novelist, playwright, journalist, magistrate; a double anniversary tribute.
Rawson (Yale U.) has edited this collection of essays on Henry Fielding, the 18th-century British writer who is widely considered to be one of the earliest masters of the English novel. Arising in honor of the 250th anniversary of Fielding's death in 1754, these contributions discuss this writer's work in the context of the politics and gender roles of the time, as well as the personal relationships that were developed with contemporaries. For students of English literature. Distributed by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Home is where the (he)art is; the family romance in late twentieth-century Mexican and Argentine theatre.
It cannot be coincidental, says Magnarelli (Spanish, Quinnipiac U., Connecticut), that so many contemporary plays revolve around the middle-class nuclear family, and/or are set precisely in the family. She even suspects that some plays deliberately try to re-instill the sense of security and community that viewers lost when they ventured outside their homes to go to the public theater. Her first section surveys plays that portray the intact family; her second section, plays that show deviations from the traditional model. Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
James Boswell; as his contemporaries saw him.
From letters, diaries, memoirs, book reviews, newspapers, and other texts, Larsen (English, Santa Monica College, California) has assembled references to and description and characterizations of English biographer and diarist Boswell (1740-95). The controversies around his personality and talents that are current today, he finds, began when he was still walking and talking. Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The liberal republicanism of John Taylor of Caroline.
Sheldon (political science, U. of Virginia-Wise) and Hill (public affairs, Roanoke College) look at the political philosophy of anti-federalist politician Taylor (1753-1824) of Caroline Country, Virgina. They argue that he reconciled Lockean liberalism and classical republicanism in ways that challenge modern beliefs about their incompatibility, and offers scholars a perspective on the US Constitution that they warn will startle many. Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Literary milieux; essays in text and context presented to Howard Erskine-Hill.
Mostly former colleagues and students celebrate the long career of Erskine-Hill (emeritus, literary history, Cambridge U.). Their topics include Shakespeare crucified, Dryden and the laurel, Pope and the veil of faith, the sleep of the dunces, and Wordsworth's poetry and repose. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
A mother's love; crafting feminine virtue in enlightenment France.
Rewriting social relations in terms of greater equality was an important but overlooked effort of Enlightenment thought, argues Walker (French and world language studies, Indiana U.-South Bend). As a case study, she chronicles the emergence of an idealized mother figure whose reforming zeal sought to make French society more equitable and just. In novels, paintings, and scientific and historical essays, she finds a depiction of female agency, a power that only a mother could wield. Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The mysterious and the foreign in early modern England.
Canadian and US scholars of English literature explore the rather sudden British interest in things beyond the shore during the 16th and 17th centuries. They consider such examples as acephalism in America, Turkish women, the taint of Jewish trans-nationality in mercantilist literature and The Merchant of Venice, tobacco, foreign and mysterious elements in the Elizabethan Settlement of religion, and Oriental motifs in English courts and civic entertainments. Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Representing France and the French in early modern English drama.
Mayer (French National Center for Scientific Research) presents previously unpublished work focusing on France's role and importance in early modern English literature and drama. The text includes a lengthy introduction including a critical presentation of the topics, then follows with five sections focusing on French intertextual threads, representations of French history on the English stage, the French language and the construction of English cultural identity, imagined geographies of Frenchness, and sex satire, and the city. Particular authors discussed include Richard Brome, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, George Chapman, and Robert Garnier. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Resiliency in hostile environments; a comunidad agrícola in Chile's Norte Chico.
Although the condition of the land in the Coquimbo region is cyclical it is also unpredictable, and the communities farming it have learned to survive not by responding as individuals but as a community. In addition, the people of the Coquimbo must band together to cope with scarce resources and the ever-growing presence of copper mining nearby. Alexander (anthropology, U. of North Carolina Wilmington) details the systems the communidades agricolas have developed to share scarce land and resources, as well as to survive harsh socioeconomic, political and economic conditions. He follows one the families as they deal with harsh natural and societal realities, and along the way challenges conventional thinking about how people who know they are marginalized survive. Distributed by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
