Gillooly and David, eds.: Contemporary Dickens

Contemporary Dickens

Edited by Eileen Gillooly and Deirdre David

Edited by Eileen Gillooly and Deirdre David, Contemporary Dickens is a collection of essays that presents some of the most intriguing work being undertaken in Dickens studies today. Through an emphasis on the nineteenth-century origins of our current critical preoccupations and ways of knowing, these essays reveal Dickens to be our contemporary. The contributors argue that such issues as gender and sexuality, environmentalism, and the construction of national identity were frequently explored and sometimes problematically resolved by Dickens himself. They also illuminate the importance of Dickens’s place in our current reassessment of critical methodologies.

Drawing freely upon a variety of reading strategies (materialist, deconstructive, new historical, psychoanalytic, and feminist), the essays disclose new aspects of Dickens’s engagements with a number of Victorian concerns—moral philosophy, the psychology of the emotions, and life writing among them—that have once again emerged as significant objects of study in early-twenty-first century criticism. Looking at such familiar topics from fresh perspectives, Contemporary Dickens is an original and challenging contribution to Dickens studies in particular and Victorian criticism in general.

Contemporary Dickens will appeal to general readers and students of Victorian culture, as well as specialists in nineteenth-century literature, cultural studies, literary formalism, psychology, and gender studies.

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Shadeland

Andrew Grace

Shadeland is not only the name of the Illinois farm on which poet Andrew Grace was raised, it is also that elusive space where language attempts to recover all that has been lost. Deeply concerned with the state of today’s rural spaces, Grace’s poems describe a landscape and a lifestyle that are both eroding. Stylistically rangy, yet united by an ardent eye for intricate imagery, Shadeland features allusions and influences as classical as Homer, Virgil, and Hopkins while still exhibiting a poetic sensibility that is thoroughly contemporary. Employing a blend of baroque and innovative language, these 21st-century pastorals and anti-pastorals both celebrate and elegize the buckshot-peppered silos and unstill corn fields that are quietly vanishing from the countryside.

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Rosenman and Klaver, eds.: Other Mothers

Other Mothers

Beyond the Maternal Ideal

Edited by Ellen Bayuk Rosenman and Claudia C. Klaver

Other Mothers, edited by Ellen Bayuk Rosenman and Claudia C. Klaver, offers a range of essays that open a conversation about Victorian motherhood as a wide-ranging, distinctive experience and idea. In spite of its importance, however, it is one of the least-studied aspects of the Victorian era, subsumed under discussions of femininity and domesticity.

This collection addresses that void and reveals the extraordinary diversity of Victorian motherhood. Exploring diaries, novels, and court cases, with contexts ranging from London to Egypt to Australia, these varied accounts take the collection “beyond the maternal ideal” to consider the multiple, unpredictable ways in which motherhood was experienced and imagined in this formative historical period.

Other Mothers joins revisionist approaches to femininity that now characterize Victorian studies. Its contents trace intersections among gender, race, and class; question the power of separate spheres ideology; and insist on the context-specific nature of social roles. The sixteen previously unpublished essays in this volume contribute to the fields of literary criticism, history, cultural studies, and history.

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Beier: For Their Own Good

For Their Own Good

The Transformation of English Working-Class Health Culture, 1880–1970

Lucinda McCray Beier

In For Their Own Good Lucinda McCray Beier examines the interactions between working-class health culture and official provision of health services and medical care in three English communities between 1880 and 1970. Based on 239 oral history interviews of laypeople and annual public health reports, this book considers gender, class, political, economic, and cultural aspects of the mid-twentieth-century shift in responsibility for illness, birth, and death from the informal domestic and neighborhood sphere to the purview of professional, institutionally based authorities.

For Their Own Good is a case study, located in a particular place and time, of a phenomenon that has occurred in all Western nations and is now happening worldwide. As in Barrow, Lancaster, and Preston, in most circumstances, the transition from traditional to modern medicine is stimulated and enforced from the top down. Current global struggles with AIDS, overpopulation, malaria, malnutrition, and other killers offer powerful reminders that elite knowledge and strategies rarely result in success unless laypeople are engaged and invested in solutions. Furthermore, as this book demonstrates, the desired transition to Western medicine carries the twin burdens of the loss of lay ability to prevent and manage ill-health, on one hand, and the demand that political elites and medical professionals meet proliferating health care needs and demands, on the other.

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MacKenzie: The Theatre of the Real

The Theatre of the Real

Yeats, Beckett, and Sondheim

Gina Masucci MacKenzie

The Theatre of the Real: Yeats, Beckett, and Sondheim traces the thread of jouissance (the simultaneous experience of radical pleasure and pain) through three major theatre figures of the twentieth century. Gina Masucci MacKenzie’s work engages theatrical text and performance in dialogue with the Lacanian Real, so as to re-envision modern theatre as the cultural site where author, actor, and audience come into direct contact with personal and collective traumas. By showing how a transgressively free subject may be formed through theatrical experience, MacKenzie concludes that modern theatre can liberate the individual from the socially constructed self.

The Theatre of the Real revises views of modern theatre by demonstrating how it can lead to a collaborative effort required for innovative theatrical work. By foregrounding Yeats’s “dancer” plays, the author shows how these intimate pieces contribute to the historical development of musical as well as modern theatre. Beckett’s universal dramas then pave the way for Sondheim’s postmodern cacophonies of idea and spirit as they introduce comic abjection into modernism’s tragic mode. This exciting work from a new author will leave readers with fresh insight to theatrical performance and its necessity in our lives.

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Chaitin: The Enemy Within

The Enemy Within

Culture Wars and Political Identity in Novels of the French Third Republic

Gilbert D. Chaitin

In The Enemy Within, Gilbert D. Chaitin deepens our understanding of the nature and sources of culture wars during the French Third Republic. The psychological trauma caused by the Ferry educational reform laws of 1880–1882, which strove to create a new national identity based on secular morality rather than God-given commandments, pitted Catholics against proponents of lay education and gave rise to novels by Bourget, Barrès, A. France, and Zola.

By deploying Lacanian concepts to understand the “erotics of politics” revealed in these novels, Chaitin examines the formation of national identity, offering a new intellectual history of the period and shedding light on the intimate relations among literature, education, philosophy, morality, and political order. The mechanisms described in The Enemy Within provide fresh insight into the affective structure of culture wars not only in the French Third Republic but elsewhere in the world today.

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Liveley and Salzman-Mitchell, eds.: Latin Elegy and Narratology

Latin Elegy and Narratology

Fragments of Story

Edited by Genevieve Liveley and Patricia Salzman-Mitchell

In recent decades, literary studies have shown great interest in issues concerning the elements of narrative. Narratology, with its most vocal exponents in the writings of Bal, Genette, and Ricoeur, has also emerged as an increasingly important aspect of classical scholarship. However, studies have tended to focus on genres that are deemed straightforwardly narrative in form, such as epic, history, and the novel. This volume of heretofore unpublished essays explores how theories of narrative can promote further understandings and innovative readings of a genre that is not traditionally seen as narrative: Roman elegy. While elegy does not tell a continuous story, it does contain many embedded tales—narratives in their own right—located within and interacting with the primarily nonnarrative structure of the external frame-text.

Latin Elegy and Narratology is the first volume entirely dedicated to the analysis of Latin elegy through the prism of theories of narrative. It brings together an international range of classicists whose specialties include Roman elegy, Augustan literature more generally, and critical theory. Among the questions explored in this volume are: Can the inset narratives of elegy, with their distinctive narrative strategies, provide the key to a poetics of elegiac story telling? In what ways does elegy renegotiate the linearity and teleology of narrative? Can formal theories of narratology help to make sense of the temporal contradictions and narrative incongruities that so often characterize elegiac stories? What can the reception of Roman elegy tell us about narratives of unity, identity, and authority? The essays contained in this volume provide provocative new readings and an enhanced understanding of Roman elegy using the tools of narratology.

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Miller: Makover Nation

Makeover Nation

The United States of Reinvention

Toby Miller

Life is very much a project in the United States—but not a straightforwardly individual one. A duality of individual free choice and disciplinary institutional governance is the grand national paradox. Simply being—leading life without a bumper sticker avowing one’s elective institutional affinities—seems implausible in a country consumed by the makeover—the idea that what you were born as need not define you forever.

As Toby Miller writes in his introduction: “I come neither to bury the makeover nor to praise the makeover, but to criticize it, even as I stand alternately bewildered, amused, appalled, and attracted by it.” In Makeover Nation he does just that in a witty, no-holds-barred style. Miller looks at the power of various forms of knowledge about people and their emotions as they have been applied to the US population, from talk therapy to drug treatment. He is particularly interested in young people—in examining how childhood is constructed—and pays close attention to the much-favored (and overused) diagnosis and treatment of ADHD/ADD. He also focuses his attention on metrosexuals and right-wing Christians to disclose how these opposing groups manifest their drive toward self-creation. Miller believes that we must question the pleasures of reinvention even as we embrace them.

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Bruno: Justified by Work

Justified by Work

Identity and the Meaning of Faith in Chicago’s Working-Class Churches

Robert Anthony Bruno

In Justified by Work, Robert Anthony Bruno sheds light on the simple but rarely asked question: “What role do faith and religious observance play in the everyday lives of working people?” While some historical work has been done on middle-, upper-, and professional-class notions of faith, money, time, and business ethics, the theological beliefs and experiences of working-class Americans have been practically ignored. Bruno’s book is embedded in the contemporary religious practices and beliefs of working-class Chicago-area congregations to show both how faith is inextricably interwoven in the everyday lives of the people who regularly attend places of worship and how class impacts the daily manifestation of these people’s religion (from theology to practice).

Most past religious scholarship has drawn a dichotomy between urban and suburban churches and has compared religious observance and denominational membership by race, gender, ethnicity, and recently, around the emergence of a “knowledge” and “entrepreneurial” class forms of church practice. Diverging from previous models, Justified by Work, based on author interviews with a wide spectrum of working-class Chicagoans, offers a comparative study of working-class religious practice and faith, across race and ethnic identity. Christian churches are represented by a Catholic Mexican congregation, an African American Baptist church, and a mixed eastern European church. Bruno examines as well how religious observance affects the life and attitudes of working-class Jews and Muslims in Chicago.

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Rastogi: Afrindian Fictions

Afrindian Fictions

Diaspora, Race, and National Desire in South Africa

Pallavi Rastogi

In the first published book-length study of Indian fiction in South Africa, Pallavi Rastogi demonstrates that Indians desire South African citizenship in the fullest sense of the word, a longing for inclusion that is asserted through an “Afrindian” identity. Afrindian Fictions: Diaspora, Race, and National Desire in South Africa examines Afrindian identity and blurs the racial binary of black and white interaction in South African studies as well as unsettles the East-West paradigm of migration dominant in South Asian diaspora studies.

While offering incisive analyses of the work of the most important South African Indian writers today—Ahmed Essop, Farida Karodia, Achmat Dangor, Imraan Coovadia, and Praba Moodley among others—the author also places South African Indian fiction within broader literary traditions. Rastogi’s project of recovery shines a light on the rich but neglected literature by South African Indians. The book closes with interviews conducted with six key South African Indian writers. Here the authors not only reflect on their own writing but also comment on many of the issues raised in the book itself, particularly the role of Indians in South Africa today, and the status of South African Indian writing.

Afrindian Fictions is a valuable introduction to South African Indian literature as well as a major interrogation of some of the foundational notions of post-colonial literary studies.

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Stein-Roggenbuck: Negotiating Relief

Negotiating Relief

The Development of Social Welfare Programs in Depression-Era Michigan, 1930–1940

Susan Stein-Roggenbuck

In Negotiating Relief, Susan Stein-Roggenbuck examines Michigan’s implementation of the New Deal relief programs and the state’s reorganization of welfare in 1939. Local officials, social workers, and recipients were key players in the Michigan debates over how best to administer relief. The book sheds important light on the profession of social work and public welfare, and the development of nonfederal relief at the state and local levels after 1935.

Guided by fiscal localism and a firm belief in home rule, local officials fought to retain control of relief. Stein-Roggenbuck argues that while significant changes occurred in welfare policy as a result of the New Deal, many continuities remained. Among those was the responsibility of families to provide financial support. Often forgotten were those on general relief—individuals who did not fit the federal programs such as Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) and Old Age Assistance (OAA). General relief became a third track of welfare.

Drawing on newspaper records, county and city board minutes, social welfare agency records, federal records, and case file records, Negotiating Relief gives voice to the numerous groups involved in welfare debates, particularly the recipients of relief. This book adds to our understanding of the local implementation of welfare policy in both rural and urban areas.

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Crawford: Dilution Anxiety and the Black Phallus

Dilution Anxiety and the Black Phallus

Margo Natalie Crawford

After the “Black is Beautiful” movement of the 1960s, black body politics have been overdetermined by both the familiar fetishism of light skin as well as the counter-fetishism of dark skin. Moving beyond the longstanding focus on the tragic mulatta and making room for the study of the fetishism of both light-skinned and dark-skinned blackness, Margo Natalie Crawford analyzes depictions of colorism in the work of Gertrude Stein, Wallace Thurman, William Faulkner, Black Arts poets, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and John Edgar Wideman. In Dilution Anxiety and the Black Phallus, Crawford adds images of skin color dilution as a type of castration to the field of race and psychoanalysis. An undercurrent of light-skinned blackness as a type of castration emerges within an ongoing story about the feminizing of light skin and the masculinizing of dark skin. Crawford confronts the web of beautified and eroticized brands and scars, created by colorism, crisscrossing race, gender, and sexuality. The depiction of the horror of these aestheticized brands and scars begins in the white-authored and black-authored modernist literature examined in the first chapters. A call for the end of the ongoing branding emerges with sheer force in the post–Black movement novels examined in the final chapters.

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Erasmo: Reading Death in Ancient Rome

Reading Death in Ancient Rome

Mario Erasmo

In Reading Death in Ancient Rome, Mario Erasmo considers both actual funerary rituals and their literary depictions in epic, elegy, epitaphs, drama, and prose works as a form of participatory theater in which the performers and the depicters of rituals engage in strategies to involve the viewer/reader in the ritual process, specifically by invoking and playing on their cultural associations at a number of levels simultaneously. He focuses on the associative reading process—the extent to which literary texts allude to funeral and burial ritual, the narrative role played by the allusion to recreate a fictive version of the ritual, and how the allusion engages readers’ knowledge of the ritual or previous literary intertexts.

Such a strategy can advance a range of authorial agendas by inviting readers to read and reread assumptions about both the surrounding Roman culture and earlier literature invoked through intertextual referencing. By (re)defining their relation to the dead, readers assume various roles in an ongoing communion with the departed.

Reading Death in Ancient Rome makes an important and innovative contribution to semiotic theory as applied to classical texts and to the emerging field of mortality studies. It should thus appeal to classicists as well as to advanced undergraduate and graduate students in art history and archeology.

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West: The Arbiters of Reality

The Arbiters of Reality

Hawthorne, Melville, and the Rise of Mass Information Culture

Peter West

The Arbiters of Reality: Hawthorne, Melville, and the Rise of Mass Information Culture disrupts our critical sense of nineteenth-century American literature by examining the storytelling strategies of both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville in light of an emerging information industry. Peter West reveals how these writers invoked telegraphic and penny press journalism, daguerreotypy, and moving panoramas in their fiction to claim for themselves a privileged access to a reality beyond the reach of a burgeoning mass audience.

Locating Hawthorne and Melville in vivid and overlooked contexts—the Salem Murder scandal of 1830, which transformed Hawthorne’s quiet city into a media-manufactured spectacle, and Melville’s New York City of 1846–47, where the American Telegraph was powerfully articulating a nation at war—West portrays the romance as a reactive, deeply rhetorical literary form and a rich historical artifact.

In the early twenty-first century, it has become a postmodern cliché to place the word “reality” in scare quotes. The Arbiters of Reality suggests that attending to the construction of the real in public life is more than simply a language of critique: it must also be understood as a specific kind of romantic self-invention.

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Stewart, ed.: The Promise of Justice

The Promise of Justice

Essays on Brown v. Board of Education

Edited by Mac A. Stewart

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas (1954) was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court in the twentieth century. It overturned the Court’s earlier ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), declaring the establishment of separate public schools for black and white students as inherently unequal. This victory paved the way for integration in public schools and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The Promise of Justice: Essays on Brown v. Board of Education, assembles fourteen essays about Brown and its consequences in the fifty years following the decision.

Several of the essayists in this anthology provide personal recollections of the conditions before and immediately after the decision in Brown. One of the authors was a child plaintiff in a related case. Another was the federal district judge responsible for deciding in favor of, and then overseeing, integration in a major northern city. Contributors to this volume include legal specialists, sociologists, educators, and political scientists. A history of the legal milestones of integration is included, as well as judgments about the progress that has been made and the need for additional actions to assure racial equality under the law. Ten of these essays first appeared in a special issue of The Negro Educational Review published in January 2005, and four were written expressly for this volume.

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