Research & Innovation

Blithedale (“Happy Valley”), another would-be modern Arcadia, is the stage for Hawthorne’s grimly comic tragedy (Henry James famously called the novel “the lightest, the brightest, the liveliest” of Hawthorne’s “unhumorous fictions”). In his introduction, Robert S. Levine considers bio-graphical and historical contexts and offers a fresh appreciation of the novel’s ironic first-person narrator.

One of Hawthorne’s great romances, The Blithedale Romance draws upon the author’s experiences at Brook Farm, the short-lived utopian community where Hawthorne spent much of 1841. Blithedale (“Happy Valley”), another would-be modern Arcadia, is the stage for Hawthorne’s grimly comic tragedy (Henry James famously called the novel “the lightest, the brightest, the liveliest” of Hawthorne’s “unhumorous fictions”). In his introduction, Robert S. Levine considers bio-graphical and historical contexts and offers a fresh appreciation of the novel’s ironic first-person narrator.

The applicability of digital forensics to archivists, curators, and others working within our cultural heritage is not necessarily intuitive. When the shared interests of digital forensics and responsibilities associated with securing and maintaining our cultural legacy are identified—preservation, extraction, documentation, and interpretation, as this report details—the correspondence between these fields of study becomes logical and compelling.

He “asked us to come and look at a ranch he offered in exchange,” Craig writes in Southern Belle (1957). “So we let him drive us in a big fast car, breaking all the speed laws.” The property they saw that day would become the Watkins Ranch in San Elido, the site of Dad's big strike in Oil! and a place that would stimulate in Sinclair a prescient depiction of the soon-to-be-developed oil field near Bakersfield at Kettleman Hills. “The road ran, smooth and flawless,” Oil! begins, “precisely fourteen feet wide, the edges trimmed as if by shears, a ribbon of grey concrete, rolled out over the valley by a giant hand. The ground went in long waves, a slow ascent and then a sudden dip; you climbed, and went swiftly over - but you had no fear, for you knew the magic ribbon would be there, clear of obstructions, unmarred by bump or scar, waiting the passage of inflated rubber wheels revolving seven times a second.” / Thrown into “a storm of motion,” Sinclair's reader can only come along for the ride. Like Dad, his “business is with the things that lie before” him, “and the past is past.” As impatient a driver as he is deliberate a businessman, Dad wants “a speed law turned inside out,” and dreams of a California where it will one day be illegal, on such roads, to drive less than forty miles an hour. “You were racing with the other people, who were always threatening to get your oil.”

The volume (536 pp.) contains 31 original essays by established and emerging scholars, with equal attention given to the early Tudor and the Elizabethan aspects of sixteenth-century literature.  The volume features contributions from several members of the department:  an essay by Theresa Coletti and Gail McMurray Gibson (Davidson College) on "The Tudor Origins of Medieval Drama"; an essay by Kimberly Anne Coles on "West of England:  The Irish Spectre in Tamburlaine"; and a Tudor chronology compiled by Kathleen Bossert. This volume presents students with a valuable historical and cultural context to the period. The Companion discusses key texts and representative subjects, and explores issues including international influences, religious change, travel and New World discoveries, women's writing, technological innovations, medievalism, print culture, and developments in music and in modes of seeing and reading.

The resulting article characterizes Loy as a representative specimen of this type whose career it is to "express her personality." Loy accomplishes such an expression, the reporter contends, by wearing clothes from the smartest shops and by crystallizing into symbols "the images that fly through her brain" ("Do You Strive"). A few years later, Harriet Monroe reported in Poetry magazine of her 1923 meeting with Loy, "I may never have fallen very hard for this lady's poetry, but her personality is irresistible. . . . Yes, poetry is in this lady whether she writes it or not" (96). Even friend Natalie Barney followed this lead. When introducing Loy's poetry reading at a meeting of her Académie des Femmes in May 1927, she focused at length on Loy's singular "personality" (158), which she analogized to that of a somnambulist who has "gazed upon the Gorgon," and so gained "some perception of the fourth dimension" (160).

Is there such a thing as a distinctive Jewish literature? The authors of the fifteen essays in this volume find the answer in a shared endeavor to use literary production and writing in general as the laboratory in which to explore and represent Jewish experience in the modern world.

Professor Edlie L. Wong contends that slavery and its logic of property had a profound effect on the notion of travel and freedom in the Atlantic World. British and American slaveholders traveled with the assumption that their right to free mobility extended to their enslaved servants. But slaves are rarely mentioned in travel accounts of the time that romanticized mobility as a unique expression of individual freedom and autonomy.Recuperating the untold narratives of slaves who accompanied their masters on trips to free territories, Professor Wong argues that these journeys between free and enslaved territories challenge the cultural logic of slavery and freedom and offer an alternative view of history to the already established genres of abolitionist and fugitive slave narratives. A volume in the new series America and the Long 19th Century.

Neither Fugitive nor Free draws on the freedom suit as recorded in the press and court documents to offer a critically and historically engaged understanding of the freedom celebrated in the literary and cultural histories of transatlantic abolitionism. Freedom suits involved those enslaved valets, nurses, and maids who accompanied slaveholders onto free soil. Once brought into a free jurisdiction, these attendants became informally free, even if they were taken back to a slave jurisdiction—at least according to abolitionists and the enslaved themselves. In order to secure their freedom formally, slave attendants or others on their behalf had to bring suit in a court of law.

The author of such classics as Our Town and The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder was a born storyteller and dramatist—rare talents on glorious display in this volume of more than three hundred letters he penned to a vast array of famous friends and beloved relatives. Through Wilder's correspondence, readers can eavesdrop on his conversations with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Noel Coward, Gene Tunney, Laurence Olivier, Aaron Copland, Paul Hindemith, Leonard Bernstein, Edward Albee, and Mia Farrow. Equally absorbing are Wilder's intimate letters to his family.

Wilder tells of roller-skating with Walt Disney, remembers an inaugural reception for FDR at the White House, describes his life as a soldier in two World Wars, and recalls dining out with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. In these pages, Thornton Wilder speaks for himself in his own unique, enduring voice—informing, encouraging, instructing, and entertaining with his characteristic wit, heart, and exuberance.

With more activities and exercises than ever before, this fifth edition of The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors provides a concise and practical introduction to tutoring. Its nine chapters provide principles and strategies for working with diverse writers and assignments in a variety of contexts: college or high school, online or face-to-face, in the writing center and beyond.

From the publisher's website:

Taking up a neglected area in the study of the crime novel, this collection investigates the growing number of writers who adapt conventions of detective fiction to expose problems of law, ethics, and truth that arise in postcolonial and transnational communities. While detective fiction has been linked to imperialism and constructions of race from its earliest origins, recent developments signal the evolution of the genre into a potent framework for narrating the complexities of identity, citizenship, and justice in a postcolonial world. Among the authors considered are Vikram Chandra, Gabriel García Márquez, Michael Ondaatje, Patrick Chamoiseau, Mario Vargas Llosa, Suki Kim, and Walter Mosley. The essays explore detective stories set in Latin America, the Caribbean, India, and North America, including novels that view the American metropolis from the point of view of Asian American, African American, or Latino characters. Offering ten new and original essays by scholars in the field, this volume highlights the diverse employment of detective fictions internationally, and uncovers important political and historical subtexts of popular crime novels.