Dylan Lewis Named to Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography
The prestigious fellowship is a capstone graduate career achievement for the English doctoral candidate.
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As Elissa Washuta makes the transition from college kid to independent adult, she finds herself overwhelmed by the calamities piling up in her brain. When her mood-stabilizing medications aren’t threatening her life, they’re shoving her from depression to mania and back in the space of an hour. Her crisis of American Indian identity bleeds into other areas of self-doubt; mental illness, sexual trauma, ethnic identity, and independence become intertwined. Sifting through the scraps of her past in seventeen formally inventive chapters, Washuta aligns the strictures of her Catholic school education with Cosmopolitan’s mandates for womanhood, views memories through the distorting lens of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and contrasts her bipolar highs and lows with those of Britney Spears and Kurt Cobain. Built on the bones of fundamental identity questions as contorted by a distressed brain, My Body Is a Book of Rules pulls no punches in its self-deprecating and ferocious look at human fallibility.
This volume presents two rare works by the modernist writer H.D.: Within the Walls, a collection of fourteen short stories, and What Do I Love?, a set of three long poems. Written during World War II in London, where H.D. chose to stay despite offers of refuge in the United States, the stories and poems recount her experiences during the Blitz. These texts capture the essence of war-torn London from the perspective of a woman with her boots on the ground.
Annette Debo’s nuanced introduction sets the cultural scene for these works. She positions the literature in three contexts: H.D.’s personal life, the story of women civilians at war, and the international history of World War II. Debo helps us comprehend a time and place that transformed “H.D. Imagiste” into the bold war writer evinced in this volume and opens our eyes to the impact of these war experiences on H.D.’s better known works.
Read More about Optical Impersonality: Science, Images, and Literary Modernism
Western accounts of human vision before the nineteenth century tended to separate the bodily eye from the rational mind. This model gave way in the mid–nineteenth century to one in which the thinking subject, perceiving body, perceptual object, and material world could not be so easily separated. Christina Walter explores how this new physiology of vision provoked writers to reconceive the relations among image, text, sight, and subjectivity. Read more at JHUP.
PHILADELPHIA, the 1840s: a corrupt banker disowns his dissolute son, who then reappears as a hardened smuggler in the contraband slave trade. Another son, hidden from his father since birth and condemned as a former felon, falls in with a ferocious street gang led by his elder brother and his revenge-hungry comrade from Cuba. His adopted sister, a beautiful actress, is kidnapped, and her remorseful black captor becomes her savior as his tavern is engulfed in flames. Vendetta, gang violence, racial tensions, and international intrigue collide in an explosive novella based on the events leading up to an infamous 1849 Philadelphia race riot. The Killers takes the reader on a fast-paced journey from the hallowed halls of academia at Yale College to the dismal solitary cells of Eastern State Penitentiary and through southwest Philadelphia's community of free African Americans. Though the book's violence was ignited by the particulars of Philadelphia life and politics, the flames were fanned by nationwide anxieties about race, labor, immigration, and sexuality that emerged in the young republic.
Penned by fiery novelist, labor activist, and reformer George Lippard (1822-1854) and first serialized in 1849, The Killers was the work of a wildly popular writer who outsold Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne in his lifetime. Long out of print, the novella now appears in an edition supplemented with a brief biography of the author, an untangling of the book's complex textual history, and excerpts from related contemporaneous publications. Editors Matt Cohen and Edlie L. Wong set the scene of an antebellum Philadelphia rife with racial and class divisions, implicated in the international slave trade, and immersed in Cuban annexation schemes to frame this compact and compelling tale.
Serving up in a short form the same heady mix of sensational narrative, local color, and impassioned politics found in Lippard's sprawling The Quaker City, or The Monks of Monks Hall, The Killers is here brought back to lurid life.
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Windows and Doors is a poetry handbook that places poststructuralist and postmodern ways of thinking alongside formalist modes, making explicit points of overlap and tension that are usually tacit. Each of Natasha Sajé’s nine essays addresses a topic of central concern to readers and writers of poetry while also making an argument about poetic language and ideology. Foundational topics—diction, syntax, rhythm, surprise, figurative language, narrative, genre, book design, and performance—are explained through the lenses of theory, history, and philosophy and illuminated through vibrant examples from the works of numerous contemporary American poets.
Read More about Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory
Read More about “Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies: The State of the Discipline.”