Research & Innovation

The journal was created and edited by POOL Productions, an experimental film company of which H.D. was a part and which used the journal as a forum for explaining the theoretical ideas behind its films. Together, H.D.’s three essays—“Beauty,” “Restraint,” and “The Mask and the Movietone”—characterize the ills of the modern human condition and suggest that cinema can help correct that condition in the spectator. In its characterization of film and the film experience, “Cinema and the Classics” reflects H.D.’s own formulation of the modernist aesthetic of impersonality and shows that that aesthetic is centered on a modern understanding of vision.

This polemic, unpublished in Loy’s lifetime, is one of her earliest prose works and offers a rather violent program for securing women’s individuality and thereby transforming their social and artistic status. Auto-Facial-Construction is an advertising pamphlet that Loy produced in 1919 to capitalize on her exercises for (supposedly) achieving the ideal mimetic relation between one’s face and one’s personality. By this time separated from her first husband, English photographer Stephen Haweis, Loy pursued many such schemes and inventions to support herself financially. Auto-Facial-Construction and “Feminist Manifesto” together—in their ruminations on individuality and personality—reflect Loy’s early ambivalence toward a modernist aesthetic of impersonality, as well as her gradual and increasing investment in the notion of human subjectivity and embodiment that it proposed.

Notes on Thought and Vision (1919) and 'Cinema and the Classics' (1927). It argues that the embodied observer proposed in fin-de-siecle optical science crucially influenced the form and goals of modernist impersonality, and charts two distinct phases in the development ofH.D.'s particular version of that aesthetic. In the first phase,H.D. looked to visual art and, inthe second, tofilmandpsychoanalysis, as modern visual discourses through which to explore the embodied and fundamentally impersonal nature of subjectivity. Through her visual languages, or 'imagetexts', she considered ultimately the implications of such a subjectivity for embodied identities like gender, sexuality, and race.

In the summer of 1918, with the Germans threatening Paris, Edward Steichen arrives in France to photograph the war for the American army. There he finds a country filled with poignant memories for him: early artistic success, marriage, the birth of two daughters, and a love affair that divided his family. Told with elegance and transporting historical sensitivity, Emily Mitchell's first novel captures the life of a great American artist caught in the reckoning of a painful past in a world beset by war. 

Cannibalism is a metaphor in the prevailing narratives of racial assimilation in the United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil, argues Nunes in her new book.Cannibal Democracy tracks its central metaphor’s circulation through the work of writers such as Mário de Andrade, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Toni Morrison and journalists of the black press, as well as work by visual artists including Magdalena Campos-Pons and Keith Piper.

Hailed by The Washington Post as "obsessive, intricate, intimate and brilliant" and as a "model of readability," Plumly's biography of John Keats that ruminates on the most personal aspects of Keats's life: his love letters, his friendships, his vulnerabilities, his triumphs, and his own complicated relationship with the prospect of immortality.

Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865-1911 examines the work of five female teachers who challenged gendered and cultural expectations to create teaching practices that met the civic and cultural needs of their students.  The volume analyzes Lydia Maria Child’s The Freedmen’s Book, a post–Civil War educational textbook for newly freed slaves; Zitkala Ša’s autobiographical essays published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900 that questioned the work of off-reservation boarding schools for Native American students; and Jovita Idar, Marta Peña, and Leonor Villegas de Magnón’s contributions to the Spanish-language newspaper La Crónica in 1910 and 1911—contributions that offered language and cultural instruction their readers could not receive in Texas public schools.

Enoch explores the possibilities and limitations of rhetorical education by focusing on the challenges that Child, Zitkala Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas made to dominant educational practices. Each of these teachers transformed their seemingly apolitical occupation into a site of resistance, revising debilitating educational methods to advance culture-based and politicized teachings that empowered their students to rise above their subjugated positions.

Refiguring Rhetorical Education considers how race, culture, power, and language are both implicit and explicit in discussions of rhetorical education for marginalized students and includes six major tenets to guide present-day pedagogies for civic engagement.

On Fairy-stories, dated to 1939, is considered Tolkien's most studied and most quoted critical essay. According to Flieger, On Fairy-stories "defined his conception of fantasy as a literary form, which led to the writing of The Lord of the Rings." Flieger and Anderson's new edition, published by HarperCollins, includes a history of the writing of the essay, extensive notes on Tolkien's allusions in the text, and commentaries.

Unpublished in book form during her lifetime, the poems of Emily Dickinson were nonetheless shared with those she trusted most -- through her letters. Smith and Vetter's new XML-based digital archive, available for purchase from University of Virginia Press, brings together seventy-four poems and letters from Emily's correspondence with her sister-in-law Susan Dickinson. Each text is presented with a digitized scan of the holograph manuscript. Users may search by date, genre, manuscript features, and full text. Dating from the 1850s to the end of Dickinson's life, the work collected here shows all the characteristic's of the poet's mature art.

Hansberry takes on residential segregation by confronting that practice not merely as a restriction on domestic space but mainly as a constriction of civic identity. The case intimates that, given the centrality of segregation to restrictive practices affecting citizenship, the relationship of African Americans to places of residence and to domestic space in general is indicative of their relationship to legal structures. The social and legal developments that directly and indirectly encouraged segregated housing during the mid-twentieth century created the conditions for African Americans to feel estranged from their domestic spaces. (1) The feelings of frustration and dissatisfaction with the "kitchenette" expressed in Gwendolyn Brooks's poem define the housing problems to come for many African American communities, and such sentiments factor into representations of domestic space in mid-20th-century African American narratives.