Associated University Presses

American literary geographies; spacial practice and cultural production, 1500-1900.

We were as much where we were as who we were, as many Americans from 1500 to 1900 identified more with their present spaces than they did with their past characteristics. In this collection of 13 interdisciplinary articles contributors describe how Americans expressed that identity, whether based on the imaginary or the experienced. Their topics include the cultural geography and linguistic development of America, the influence of the fight over federalism, the association of panorama pamphlets with manifest destiny, the maps of Chateaubriand and Balzac as delineators, the writing of William Emory about the US/Mexico border, the building of the American cemetery system and railroad into literary devices, land speculation and its maps in Melville, revisionist geographies of abolitionism and of the American slave, geographies of the self in nineteenth century women's travel writing, and the reduction of the world to the level of a gameboard by the media. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

The art of procrastination; Baudelaire's poetry in prose.

Together with Aloysius Bertrand and others, Charles Beaudelaire (1821-1867) pioneered the genre of prose poetry and the posthumously published work Le Spleen de Paris, also known as Petit Poémes en prose, is one of the more significant of his efforts in this regard. Conducting readings of the 51 short prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris, Krueger (French, U. of Virginia) examines referential, structural, and textual representations of temporality in Baudelaire's prose poems and also explores the role of time and narrative in structuring the genre of prose poetry. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Backcountry crucibles; the Lehigh Valley from settlement to steel.

Edited by Soderlund (history, Lehigh U.) and Parzynski (Montgomery County Community College in Pennsylvania), this volume collects 14 essays originating out of the conference, "Historical Perspectives on the Lehigh Valley Region." The contributions collectively promote the value of regional history for exploring this area of Pennsylvania and individually address such topics as religion and German settlers, the cultural background of Scottish and Irish settlement, the development of Moravian industrial technology in Bethlehem from the middle of the 18th century to the early 19th century, religious conflict and violence in German communities during the Great Awakening, the rise of newspaper politics, the industrial transformation of the Lehigh River, the rise of Bethlehem Steel, and gender and economic decline in the anthracite coal region from 1920 to 1970. Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Catholic theology in Shakespeare's plays.

The victors write history, so it is no surprise the English Reformation was actually neither as swift nor as thorough as its press releases claimed. Beauregard (church history, St. John's School of Theology) makes good use of revisionist history, which finds this reformation was imposed from the top and resisted by the people, including, apparently, Shakespeare. As he works through comedies, tragedies and histories he finds Catholic teachings on penance, grace, life in religion, the sacrament of marriage, purgatory, revenge, nature and authority. Particularly interesting is the chapter on the last lines of Prospero in The Tempest, which under Beauregard's interpretation would not seem to ask for indulgence for the working of magic but instead for beliefs that first audiences would associate with capital crimes. Distributed by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Clio's daughters; British women making history, 1790-1899.

Scholars of English literature explore depictions during the height of imperial Britain of women making history both within and before that period. Their topics include Flor Annie Steel's On the Face of the Waters, Froude and Strickland on Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots, toward a literary historiography in Gaskell and Eliot, and Victorian travel narrative as a historical record of British imperial desires in China. Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Creating the hybrid intellectual; subject, space, and the feminine in the narrative of José María Arguedas.

This work by Lambright (modern languages and literature, Trinity College) is billed as the first English-language book on Peruvian novelist, poet, and anthropologist José María Arguedas (1911- 1969). Lambright argues that Arguedas, "the consummate hybrid intellectual," found his principle literary voice in the voice of the feminine. In doing this, she argues, through her analysis of nature, music, and the semiotic in the writings of Arguedas, that he confronted dominant discourse by appropriating its language and seeking to overturn it. In her analysis, she includes readings of works that have been less studied, including short stories and El Sexto in addition to consideration of the more critically acclaimed works of Arguedas. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Death row letters; correspondence with Donald Ray Wallace, Jr.

This volume reproduces the half-decade of correspondence between Leslie, a professor of anthropology, and Donald Ray Wallace, a prisoner executed for murder by the state of Indiana in March of 2005. While Wallace accepted responsibility for his crime, the correspondence between the two can still be read as protest against capital punishment as the autodidactic Wallace's readings in philosophy, religion, politics, and literature turn him into a very different man from the one who committed the crimes for which he was put to death. As Leslie puts it, "I served as a foil for his intellectual aspirations while he acted as my instructor." Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Elfriede Jelinek; writing woman, nation, and identity; a critical anthology.

Konzett (German, Russian, and Asian languages, Tufts U.) and Lamb- Faffelberger (German, Lafayette College) provide 13 essays that introduce the work of Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, to English-speaking readers, such as scholars, teachers, and students. They examine Jelinek's works and ways to interpret them, including her essay "Sidelined," novels and plays, both early and later, and two film adaptations: Die Ausgesperrten and Die Klavierspielerin. The essays on the early works address her views about politics and the power of the arts to create social change, as well as her feminism, and the later ones consider inspiration from current events, themes of nationhood and citizenship, and musicality in Die Klavierspielerin, among other topics. Other works analyzed include Die Liebhaberinnen, Stecken, Stab und Stangl, Das Leberwohl, In den Alpen, and Die Kinder der Toten. Contributors are mostly scholars of German language, literature, and culture from the US. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

French XX bibliography; a bibliography for the study of French literature and culture since 1885, v.12, no.3, issue no.58.

Covering materials published in 2006, this edition includes new entries to complete the information for previous year. This issue contains nearly 8,800 entries, covering general subjects, authors subjects arranged alphabetically and cinema. General subjects include anthologies and collections, bibliography, bibliophilism and publication, Francophone literature, French literary history, literary themes and topics, literary theories and esthetics, memoirs and autobiography, novels and short stories, philosophy, poetry, psychology, religion, surrealism and theater, with a miscellaneous category which includes such materials as proceedings. Entries for cinema include a collection of general subjects such as criticism and material on individual directors, cinema authors, theorists, and actors arranged alphabetically. All entries include complete citations. Distributed by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

A Huguenot on the Hackensack; David Demarest and his legacy.

Born in Picardy and a Protestant, Demerest married in The Netherlands, started his family in Germany, and eventually moved to Staten Island and Harlem in the US to settle along the Hankensack River. He was an adept businessman and his politics were flexible enough to ensure success under both the Dutch and the English. The following generations were, like him, devoted churchmen and his gift for entrepreneurship seemed to be genetic. They spread out from New Jersey to Pennsylvania, New York and Kentucky. As railroads came in the power of the family dwindled, but as the authors (who are brothers and descendants of Demerest) demonstrate, theirs was the story of a colony, a new nation, and a constantly changing society. The authors make good use of family records and lore, and clearly show how such families slowly became ordinary. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Imagery and ideology; fiction and painting in nineteenth-century France.

Berg (French and Italian, U. of Wisconsin-Madison) explores the interplay of elements between the two creative media as manifested in nine pair of works — a text and a painting that are related through topic, theme, or technique. They include Chateaubriand and Girodet; Salome's dance in Flaubert, Moreau, and Huysmans; and kaleidoscopic images of Algerian women in Delacroix, Picasso, and Djebar. Some of the grouping, obviously, are French couples. Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

In corpore; bodies in post-unification Italy.

In introducing this collection of 11 essays examining bodies as a medium of modern Italian culture, Polezzi (Italian studies, U. of Warwick, UK) and Ross (Italian studies, U. of Birmingham, UK) cite the postmodern concept of the body as a cultural construction. The wide-ranging treatments embody Fascist-era and contemporary gender and racial ideals, views of the female and male body and sexuality in literature (e.g., Isabella Santacroce's novels) and the visual arts (e.g., Pasolini's films), and the application of X-rays to the bones of saints and Dante to verify cultural ancestry. Distributed by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Ireland and transatlantic poetics; essays in honor of Denis Donoghue.

Selected and revised from a June 2003 conference in Belfast, 14 essays describe Donoghue's transatlantic approach to literary criticism and its practice in Dublin, then present examples of it. The topics include English studies at University College Dublin; Yeats, bibliographical opportunity, and the life of the text; transatlantic transactions, Irish players, and American reviewers; and contemporary Irish constructions of New York City. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

The Italian gothic and fantastic encounters and rewritings of narrative traditions.

The gothic never really died out in Italian literature after its golden days in the late nineteenth century. It shook off its sleep in the middle of the twentieth century and continues in both traditional novels and alternative media such as the graphic novel. Convinced that the gothic and fantastic are useful as sources of subversion, the contributors of these ten articles cover such critical issues as the boundaries of the fantastic and new readings of Freud's ideas about the "uncanny," experiments in themes such as dismemberment, the writer as somnambulist, sensation and education, and the shift from the familiar to the fantastic, and the work of women such as Ortese, Ombre and Capriolo. The result also works well as a critic study and as a survey of significant gothic and fantastic works. Distributed by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Medieval and Renaissance drama in England; v.20.

A special forum for this issue presents three essays considering issues of race, racism, and performance on the early modern English stage. Another five articles look at such diverse topics as madness and hagiography in Hamlet, curtains on the Shakespearean stage, and performing foreign tongues. Following are short notes and documents, review essays, and reviews of recently published books. Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Monsters in and among us; toward a Gothic criminology.

Apparently American culture is assuming a gothic cast, judging from its encroachment into popular culture. It has even crept into modes of therapy, into policy, and even into Hollywood movies. This collection of interdisciplinary essays, which seeks out the monstrous now let loose amongst us, addresses civic gothic as a genre, definitions of masculinity in such gothic classics as Dirty Harry, the rhetorical structure of The Man Who Knew Too Much, the substance abuse film and the use of the hallucinatory, considering incorporation as a monstrous process, rogue copy images as monsters, gothic elements now in criminology and criminal justice policy, the compulsions of serial killers on the streets and in the movies and their parallels with vampires, and profiling terrorists as monsters and mass murderers. Distributed by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Multicultural literature in contemporary Italy.

In a companion to Mediterranean Crossroads: Migration Literature in Italy the 23 short stories here sample recent fiction in Italian by immigrants and their descendants who have been in Italy long enough that their topics and attitudes have evolved. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Napoleon's sorcerers; the Sophisians.

The cult of Isis, a form of nature worship, had its roots in Napoleon's African campaigns, and Spieth (art history, Louisiana State U.) traces the reach of that cult into politics and culture, ranging from the influence of networks of powerful members of secret societies to themes in visual arts, theater and music. He analyzes the content of surviving texts, including the very important but hitherto unpublished "Golden Book" of the Isis-worshipping Sophisians, and explains how Sophisian precepts influenced Napoleonic propaganda, boulevard theater, and even modern philosophical concepts of deism and proteo-evolutionism. He explains how ideas form from ideas, and how ritual expands into philosophy. Distributed by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Nietzsche and the rebirth of the tragic.

We are sorely lacking in tragedy, in culture generally and especially on the stage. So say these nine essays addressing the legacy of Nietzsche's theories of tragedy as a literary genre and of the tragic as an ontological concept. Drawing on The Birth of Tragedy and Nietzsche's later works, contributors examine various works and schools of thought that have or have not acknowledged their debt to Nietzsche. They address Nietzsche's influence as a tragic poet, Nietzsche's relation with Strindberg and the idea of tragedy, the Dionysian women of D'Annunzio and the rebirth of tragedy in Italy, elements of Nietzsche in Yeats's lyric poetry, Russian concepts of tragic philosophy and their debt to Nietzsche, Weil's take on the Holocaust in Mendelssohn is on the Roof, Artaud's take on Nietzsche and tragic politics, Nietzsche's influence on Our Town, and the Nietzschean spirit of Godard's Prénom Carmen. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Painting and the turn to cultural modernity in Spain; the time of Eugenio Lucas Velázquez (1850-1870).

The 1850s and 1860s are widely seen as a crucial turning point in modern painting, with its fulcrum in Paris. Ginger (Hispanic studies, U. of Stirling) discusses the parallel turn to cultural modernity in Spain from 1850 on, particularly exploring an alternative modernity that is critically at odds with the canonical tradition of the French avant-garde and its legacy. Veláquez (1817-70) is at the center, he says, but his concern is more with the context that nurtured him than with his own peculiarities. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Passing; a strategy to dissolve identities and remap differences.

Italian native Hostert (philosophy, Florida Atlantic U.) generalizes the concept of passing from its African-American origins to explore how other people cope with identities that fall between recognized categories. Her study was originally published in Italy in 1996 as Passing Dissolvere le identitá, superare le differenze, and again in 2006. Distributed in the US by Associated University Presses. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)