Research & Innovation

Andrew Jewell and Marilee Lindemann discuss last year's publication of The Selected Letters of Willa Cather and the impact that volume has had on Cather studies. Francis Murphy reports from the Old Burying Ground in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, where changes were made to Cather's and Lewis's grave markers in 2013. Finally, we're treated to Andrew Ek's poem "The Year My Sister Went East."

    H.D. called By Avon River "the first book that really made me happy." In this annotated edition, Lara Vetter argues that the volume represented a turning point in H.D.’s career, a major shift from lyric poetry to the experimental forms of writing that would dominate her later works.

    Near the end of World War II, after having remained in London throughout the Blitz, H.D. made a pilgrimage to Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace. This experience resulted in a hybrid volume of poetry about The Tempest and prose about Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Featuring a tour-de-force introduction and extensive explanatory notes, this is the first edition of the work to appear since its original publication in 1949.

    Increasingly after the war, H.D. sought new forms of writing to express her persistent interests in the politics of gender and in issues of nationhood and home. By Avon River was one of her only postwar works to cross over to mainstream audiences, and, as such, is a welcome addition to our understanding of this significant modernist writer.

    H.D. (born Hilda Doolittle, 1886–1961) was an American expatriate writer whose work exerted enormous influence on modernist poetry and prose. Lara Vetter is associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and author of Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse: H.D., Loy, and Toomer.

UpSet Press is pleased to announce the release of A Nuclear Family, April Naoko Heck’s debut book of poetry. As we approach the 70-year anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb, Heck’s timely collection explores the brink of creation and annihilation — the dawning of the nuclear age and the shaping of Japanese American identity within the shadows of WWII.

On August 6, 1945, in Hiroshima prefecture, Heck’s great-grandmother walked in a field 2.5 miles away from the blast’s epicenter. Meanwhile, 20 miles away, in the town of Otake, Heck’s mother was in the womb of her mother, presumably safe from the impending nuclear fallout.

Drawing from conversations with family members and historical research, Heck traces the footsteps of her great-grandmother, and then turns her attention westward to her literal nuclear family in poems about her Caucasian American father’s job at a nuclear power plant, as well as his later illness and passing.

As Kimiko Hahn discerns for us, “Plain horror courses beneath the surface of many of these poems — and that intensity issues from the history we know and the history we could not know because A Nuclear Family really is a poetry-memoir. And such a collection makes me realize how without art, we only have dry records. With April Naoko Heck’s poetry, we now have the burning horse, white light and black rain, a skull pulverized for medicine, a hundred Canada geese, the Ponce de Leon Motel, a frozen lake. And where horror subsides, there is a lovely tranquility. Read these poems and trust this history.”

The poems in Pax Americana are born out of the violent, fractious, and disillusioning opening to the 21^st century. The decade of protracted wars and economic collapse—coupled with the polarizing of wealth and ideologies in the U.S.—create the catalysts for this book. These are social poems that want to talk and, through talking, hopefully make a space where people can meet and find meaning in each other.

Much has been written about the seismic shifts in American culture and politics during the 1960s. Yet for all the analysis of that turbulent era, its legacy remains unclear. In this elegantly written book, David Wyatt offers a fresh perspective on the decade by focusing on the pivotal year of 1968. He takes as his point of departure the testimony delivered by returning veteran John Kerry before the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1971, as he imagined a time in the future when the word “Vietnam” would mean “the place where America finally turned.” But turning from what, to what—and for better or for worse?

Wyatt explores these questions as he retraces the decisive moments of 1968—the Tet Offensive, the McCarthy campaign, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the student revolt at Columbia, the “police riot” at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, Lyndon Johnson’s capitulation, and Richard Nixon’s ascendency to power. Seeking to recover the emotions surrounding these events as well as analyze their significance, Wyatt draws on the insights of what Michael Herr has called “straight” and “secret” histories. The first category consists of work by professional historians, traditional journalists, public figures, and political operatives, while the second includes the writings of novelists, poets, New Journalists, and memoirists.

The aim of this parallel approach is to uncover two kinds of truth: a “scholarly truth” grounded in the documented past and an “imaginative truth” that occupies the more ambiguous realm of meaning. Only by reckoning with both, Wyatt believes, can Americans come to understand the true legacy of the 1960s.

In Bed Stuy, New York, a small misunderstanding can escalate into having a price on your head—even if you’re totally clean. This gritty, triumphant debut captures the heart and the hardship of life for an urban teen.

A lot of the stuff that gives my neighborhood a bad name, I don’t really mess with. The guns and drugs and all that, not really my thing.

Nah, not his thing. Ali’s got enough going on, between school and boxing and helping out at home. His best friend Noodles, though. Now there’s a dude looking for trouble—and, somehow, it’s always Ali around to pick up the pieces. But, hey, a guy’s gotta look out for his boys, right? Besides, it’s all small potatoes; it’s not like anyone’s getting hurt.

And then there’s Needles. Needles is Noodles’s brother. He’s got a syndrome, and gets these ticks and blurts out the wildest, craziest things. It’s cool, though: everyone on their street knows he doesn’t mean anything by it.

Yeah, it’s cool…until Ali and Noodles and Needles find themselves somewhere they never expected to be…somewhere they never should've been—where the people aren't so friendly, and even less forgiving.

Emily Dickinson, A User's Guide presents a comprehensive introduction to the life and works of Emily Dickinson, Offers a richly appreciative biographical and critical introduction to America's most widely admired woman poet Written by a world-renowned Emily Dickinson scholar and American literary critic Represents the only book that reads Dickinson through her manuscripts, the print editions of her work, and the major digital Dickinson editions published since 1994 The User's Guide is a new kind of book for a new era of reading Is the only book that is an introduction to the poet, her work, and her receptions among readers Is the only book that presents new biography and textual discoveries that have just come to light in 2011 Interprets Dickinson through the dynamic interchange between the reader's sense of her life and her work Draws on prominent critical views from the past century, including sentimental, modernist, new critical, psychological, feminist, queer, and postmodernist readings.

Read more at Amazon.

Her essay traces how the landmark legal decision of Slade’s Case is processed through Thomas Middleton’s use of the debt bond in Michaelmas Term—a play that dramatises for the benefit of its Inns of Court audience ‘the court’s intensified interest in the intentionality of the debtor.’

While this play may offer insight into the crisis of monarchical legitimacy, its most salient contribution to the English political imaginary remains unacknowledged. What is remarkable about Macbeth is not its engagement with established political topoi but its tendency to strain the parameters of early modern political discourse itself. Rather than simply stage competing ideas of sovereignty, Shakespeare insistently focuses on the affective mapping of national identification, and in this way pries open the very category of the political.

Amanda Bailey shows that the early modern theater, itself dependent on debt bonds, was well positioned to stage the complex ethical issues raised by a system of forfeiture that registered as a bodily event. While plays about debt like The Merchant of Venice and The Custom of the Country did not use the language of political philosophy, they were artistically and financially invested in exploring freedom as a function of possession. By revealing dramatic literature's heretofore unacknowledged contribution to the developing narrative of possessed persons, Amanda Bailey not only deepens our understanding of creditor-debtor relations in the period but also sheds new light on the conceptual conditions for the institutions of indentured servitude and African slavery. Of Bondage is vital not only for students and scholars of English literature but also for those interested in British and colonial legal history, the history of human rights, and the sociology of economics.