Research & Innovation

The poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) came on the literary scene in the 1910s as a young American expatriate living in England. Her early lyric poems, in Sea Garden, helped launch the free verse movement known as imagism. Her work as a whole, spanning five decades, includes long narrative poems, novels, memoirs, and translations. Her experience of the two world wars in Europe is felt throughout her oeuvre, much of which focuses on the power and destructiveness of war. Other recurring topics are ancient models of civilization, comparative mythology, and female deities suppressed in the modern era.

Since the 1970s, H.D.'s poetry and prose have appeared regularly on undergraduate and graduate syllabi, in courses ranging from American or British modernism and gender and sexuality studies to literature of war and classical literature and mythology. Yet her work--complex and densely allusive--can be difficult for students to comprehend and for instructors to teach. This volume aims to assist instructors in helping their students navigate the intricacies of H.D.'s work and overcome some of the frustration of deciphering modern poetry. The first part, "Materials," presents resources useful to instructors of H.D.'s work, and the second part, "Approaches," offers specific ways to teach her wide-ranging corpus. Contributors describe courses that teach H.D. in the context of modernism, alongside such writers as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. Others follow the themes of myth and religion in her long epic poems Helen in Egypt and Trilogy and her autobiographical work The Gift. H.D.'s analysis with Freud and her subsequent memoir of the experience find their place in a course on critical theory. Many instructors teach H.D. through the lens of sexuality, feminism, or race; others use interdisciplinary approaches that focus on H.D.'s engagement with film.

In Phillis Wheatley, Vincent Carretta offers the first full-length biography of a figure whose origins and later life have remained shadowy despite her iconic status.  A scholar with extensive knowledge of transatlantic literature and history, Carretta uncovers new details about Wheatley’s origins, her upbringing, and how she gained freedom. Carretta solves the mystery of John Peters, correcting the record of when he and Wheatley married and revealing what became of him after her death. Assessing Wheatley’s entire body of work, Carretta discusses the likely role she played in the production, market­ing, and distribution of her writing. Wheatley developed a remarkable transatlantic network that transcended racial, class, political, religious, and geographical boundaries. Carretta reconstructs that network and sheds new light on her religious and political identities. In the course of his research he discovered the earliest poem attributable to Wheatley and has included it and other unpublished poems in the biography.

With The Lucretian Renaissance, Gerard Passannante offers a radical rethinking of a familiar narrative: the rise of materialism in early modern Europe. Passannante begins by taking up the ancient philosophical notion that the world is composed of two fundamental opposites: atoms, as the philosopher Epicurus theorized, intrinsically unchangeable and moving about the void; and the void itself, or nothingness. Passannante considers the fact that this strain of ancient Greek philosophy survived and was transmitted to the Renaissance primarily by means of a poem that had seemingly been lost—a poem insisting that the letters of the alphabet are like the atoms that make up the universe.

By tracing this elemental analogy through the fortunes of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, Passannante argues that, long before it took on its familiar shape during the Scientific Revolution, the philosophy of atoms and the void reemerged in the Renaissance as a story about reading and letters—a story that materialized in texts, in their physical recomposition, and in their scattering.

From the works of Virgil and Macrobius to those of Petrarch, Poliziano, Lambin, Montaigne, Bacon, Spenser, Gassendi, Henry More, and Newton, The Lucretian Renaissance recovers a forgotten history of materialism in humanist thought and scholarly practice and asks us to reconsider one of the most enduring questions of the period: what does it mean for a text, a poem, and philosophy to be “reborn”?

Read more at the publisher's website.

"Finding Gordon Lipschitz" is the story of one man's desperate search for his long-lost friend and high school valedictorian. At his twenty-five year high school reunion, Harris Greenberg realizes that his once promising life has turned into a depressing failure. When he discovers that Gordon Lipschitz hasn't been seen since graduation, Harris embarks on a desperate mission to find him. Enlisting the help of old friends, Gordon is found in the most unlikely place, a shell of his former self. The search becomes a journey of self-discovery for four friends whose lives turned out much differently than any of them expected.

The sheer number of different ethnic groups and cultures in the United States makes it tempting to classify them according to broad stereotypes, ignoring their unique and changing identities. Because of their growing diversity within the United States, Latinas and Latinos face this problem in their everyday lives. With cultural roots in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, or a variety of other locales, Hispanic-origin people in the United States are too often consigned to a single category. With this book Blas Falconer and Lorraine M. López set out to change this.

The Other Latin@ is a diverse collection of essays written by some of the best emerging and established contemporary writers of Latin origin to help answer the question: How can we treat U.S. Latina and Latino literature as a definable whole while acknowledging the many shifting identities within their cultures? By telling their own stories, these authors illuminate the richness of their cultural backgrounds while adding a unique perspective to Latina and Latino literature.

This book sheds light on the dangers of abandoning identity by accepting cultural stereotypes and ignoring diversity within diversity. These contributors caution against judging literature based on the race of the author and lament the use of the term Hispanic to erase individuality. Honestly addressing difficult issues, this book will greatly contribute to a better understanding of Latina and Latino literature and identity.

Chronicling the events that took place in Grenada from 1951—when workers revolted against the white owners of the sugar and cocoa estates—to the U.S. invasion in 1983, this revised and expanded edition follows headstrong Angel and her mother Doodsie as they experience the deposition of the old, corrupted leadership with conflicted emotions. As their community struggles for independence, the political conflicts in Grenada tear long-term relationships apart, provoke fratricidal killings, and allow an outrageous breach of sovereignty. Seamlessly moving between these serious events and the warmth and tensions of family life, this celebrated novel offers an informed account of the revolution and a richly developed vernacular.

Read more at Amazon.

From the publisher's website:

I'm a glutton in a greyhound's body, a walking contradiction, in the grip of the one thing I can't have—food."

Food is not just sustenance. It is memories, a lobster roll on the beach in Maine; heritage, hot pastrami club with a half-sour pickle; guilty pleasures, a chocolate rum-soaked Bundt cake; identity, vegetarian or carnivore. Food is the sensuality of a ripe strawberry or a pork chop sizzling on the grill. But what if the very thing that keeps you alive, that bonds us together and marks occasions in our lives, became a toxic substance, an inflammatory invader? In this beautifully written memoir, both gut-wrenching and inspiring, award-winning writer Jon Reiner explores our complex and often contradictory relationship with food as he tells the story of his agonizing battle with Crohn's disease—and the extraordinary places his hunger and obsession with food took him.

The Man Who Couldn't Eat is an unvarnished account of a marriage in crisis, children faced with grown-up fears, a man at a life-and-death crossroads sifting through his past and his present. And it shows us a tough, courageous climb out of despair and hopelessness. Aided by the loving kindness of family, friends, and strangers and by a new approach to food, Reiner began a process of healing in body and mind. Most of all, he chose life—and a renewed appetite, any way he could manage it, for the things that truly matter most.

For additional information about Jon Reiner, visit his website: www.jonreiner.com

A comprehensive guide to the language of argument, Rhetorical Style offers a renewed appreciation of the persuasive power of the English language. Drawing on key texts from the rhetorical tradition, as well as on newer approaches from linguistics and literary stylistics, Fahnestock demonstrates how word choice, sentence form, and passage construction can combine to create effective spoken and written arguments. With examples from political speeches, non-fiction works, and newspaper reports, Rhetorical Style surveys the arguer's options at the word, sentence, interactive, and passage levels, and illustrates the enduring usefulness of rhetorical stylistics in analyzing and constructing arguments.

In this land of Milk & Honey, poems flow. Contemporary Jewish, lesbian poets address an array of experiences – relationships between and among women, family relationships, politics, solitude, ethical responsibilities, history, solidarity, and community. Milk & Honey features beloved poets like Ellen Bass, Robin Becker, Elana Dykewomon, Marilyn Hacker, Eleanor Lerman, Joan Nestle, Lesléa Newman and Ellen Orleans, as well as new and emerging voices. With language and imagery that moves from the sensual and political to the tender and serene, Milk & Honey explores the vibrant, complicated, exhilarating experience of being Jewish and lesbian—or queer—in the world today.