Research & Innovation

This Companion to America's greatest woman poet showcases the diversity and excellence that characterize the thriving field of Dickinson studies. This landmark volume features new work being done in the critique of nineteenth-century American poetry generally, as well as new work being done. The Companion is designed to be used alongside the Dickinson Electronic Archives (of which Smith is Executive Editor and Coordinator), an online resource developed over the past ten years.

Douglass and Melville addressed in their writings a range of issues that continue to resonate in American culture: the reach and limits of democracy; the nature of freedom; the roles of race, gender, and sexuality; and the place of the United States in the world. Yet they are rarely discussed together. In eighteen original essays, the contributors to this collection explore the convergences and divergences of these two extraordinary literary lives. 

Based on the life of an actual soldier who claimed to have fought at Bunker Hill, Israel Potter is unique among Herman Melville's books: a novel in the guise of a biography. In telling the story of Israel Potter's fall from Revolutionary War hero to peddler on the streets of London, where he obtained a livelihood by crying "Old Chairs to Mend," Melville alternated between invented scenes and historical episodes. This edition reproduces the definitive text and includes selections from Potter's autobiography.

Kimberly Anne Coles explores their contribution to this tradition through thorough archival research in publication history and book circulation; the interaction of women's texts with those written by men; and the traceable influence of women's writing upon other contemporary literary works. Focusing primarily upon Katherine Parr, Anne Askew, Mary Sidney Herbert, and Anne Vaughan Lok, Coles argues that the writings of these women were among the most popular and influential works of sixteenth-century England. This book is full of prevalent material and fresh analysis for scholars of early modern literature, culture and religious history

Godard has something he wants both to preserve (singularity) and destroy (visual and aural totalitarianism). How is it possible to speak about the Other? How is it possible for the Other to speak? Does all speaking about or by the Other render that speaking common, thereby rendering what is different identical? These questions gather together a number of issues that cross and intersect disciplinary boundaries: signification, representation, ethics, politics, and so on.

This landmark collection brings together a range of exciting new comparative work in the burgeoning field of hemispheric studies.  Scholars address the urgent question of how we might reframe disciplinary boundaries within the broad area of what is generally called American studies. The essays take as their starting points such questions as what happens if the "fixed" borders of a nation are recognized not only as historically produced political constructs but also as component parts of a deeper, more multilayered series of national and indigenous histories?

Unpublished in book form during her lifetime, the poems of Emily Dickinson were nonetheless shared with those she trusted most—through her letters. This XML-based archive brings together seventy-four poems and letters from Emily’s correspondence with her sister-in-law and primary confidante, Susan Dickinson. Each text is presented with a digitized scan of the holograph manuscript. These images have zoom functionality as well as a special light-box feature that allows users to view and compare constellations of related documents. 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 characteristics of the poet’s mature art.

Mechanisms is the first book in its field to devote significant attention to storage—the hard drive in particular—of electronic writing and new media. Kirschenbaum argues that understanding the affordances of storage devices is essential to understanding new media. Drawing a distinction between "forensic materiality" and "formal materiality," Kirschenbaum uses applied computer forensics techniques in his study of new media works. Alan Liu writes that this book "is the most rigorous, cohesive, historically informed, materially grounded, and theoretically interesting treatment of textual artifacts in the age of digital mutation that I have yet encountered."

This book argues that in the course of grappling with skepticism, Shakespeare and Donne revolutionize the art of memory and discover an art of doubt.  Topics important to students of Renaissance literature—such as mimesis, exemplarity, pastoral and typology—become transformed, seen now as a set of vital responses to the incursion of skeptical doubt. By discussing the aesthetics of memorialization, the representation of collective memory, and ideas of women as countermonuments, the book investigates how Donne and Shakespeare respond to epistemological uncertainty. The book should interest admirers of Shakespeare and Donne as well as those intrigued by Stanley Cavell and the avenues he has opened up for a new philosophical literary criticism.