Research & Innovation

61.3 (2008): 792-832.

This work explores Edith Wharton's career-long concern with a 19th-century visual culture that limited female artistic agency and expression. Wharton repeatedly invoked the visual arts--especially painting—as a medium for revealing the ways that women's bodies have been represented (as passive, sexualized, infantalized, sickly, dead). Well-versed in the Italian masters, Wharton made special use of the art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, particularly its penchant for producing not portraits of individual women but instead icons onto whose bodies male desire is superimposed.

Emily Orlando contends that while Wharton's early work presents women enshrined by men through art, the middle and later fiction shifts the seat of power to women. From Lily Bart in The House of Mirth to Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country and Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence, women evolve from victims to vital agents, securing for themselves a more empowering and satisfying relationship to art and to their own identities.

Orlando also studies the lesser-known short stories and novels, revealing Wharton’s re-workings of texts by Browning, Poe, Balzac, George Eliot, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and, most significantly, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts is the first extended study to examine the presence in Wharton's fiction of the Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting of Rossetti and his muses, notably Elizabeth Siddall and Jane Morris. Wharton emerges as one of American literature's most gifted inter-textual realists, providing a vivid lens through which to view issues of power, resistance, and social change as they surface in American literature and culture.

Pairing authors with major political and cultural events in the 19th century United States, Levine's book challenges the perceived cohesion of "American literary nationalism." According to the UNC Press website, Levine's study proposes that by examining the discordance in literature, our "American literary history helps us to better understand and learn from writers trying to make sense of their own historical moments."

Eric Sundquist of UCLA has called Dislocating Race and Nation "rich and compelling" and John Stauffer of Harvard said that Levine's work is "one of the most important works of American literary history, cultural criticism, and the contested nature of nationalism to emerge in recent years."

Read more about Dislocating Race and Nation.

Literature Compass 5 (2008): 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00588.x

Logan identifies experiences of nineteenth-century African Americans that provided opportunities to develop effective communication and critical text-interpretation skills. Logan considers how nontraditional sites, which seldom involved formal training in rhetorical instruction, proved to be effective resources for African American advancement. Jacqueline Bacon has praised Logan's book as an "outstanding work that will make a significant contribution in the fields of rhetoric and composition."

This anthology makes available for the first time a selection of narratives by and about prostitutes in the eighteenth century. These memoirs, some written by and some about eighteenth-century prostitutes, off important insights into female experience and class and gender roles in the period. Portraying the lives of women in both success and hardship, written in voices from repentant to bawdy, the memoirs show the complexity of the lives of the "nightwalkers."

Unrivaled diversity and teachability have made The Heath Anthology a best-selling text. In presenting a more inclusive canon of American literature, The Heath Anthology changed the way American literature is taught. The Sixth Edition continues to balance the traditional, leading names in American literature with lesser-known writers and have built upon the anthology's other strengths: its apparatus and its ancillaries.