Research & Innovation

The final book in Howard Norman's Canadian Trilogy: a novel about spirit-photographs, adultery, and greed. It is 1927, Young Peter Duvett has accepted a job as an assistant to the elusive portraitist, Vienna Linn, in the remote town of Churchill, Manitoba. Peter arrives in Chruchill on the very night of his employer's wedding only to fall under the spell of Vienna's brilliant and beautiful wife, Kala Murie. Peter is drawn more and more deeply to Kala as he reluctantly comes to share her obsession with "spirit pictures," photographs in which the faces of the long-dead or forgotten mysteriously appear -- and he sees more adn more terrifying scenes come to life in the darkroom. Howard Norman's The Haunting of L. is a chilling fable of moral blindness and artistic ambition, from a writer of "complexly tragic vision" (Richard Bernstein, The New York Times).

“I am negotiating to buy Stephen King's Wang,” he announces deadpan. “The provenance,” Ngemi continues, “is immaculate, the price high, but, I believe, reasonable. A huge thing, one of the early dedicated word processors.” King, in fact, acquired his Wang word processor in 1983, the same year Time Magazine dubbed personal computers the “machine of the year.” The Wang would have included a Z80 processor and 64K of RAM. Clearly the technology was tantalizing to him. The following year, in the introduction to his short story collection Skeleton Crew, King wrote: In particular I was fascinated with the INSERT and DELETE buttons, which make cross-outs and carets almost obsolete&. I thought, “Wouldn't it be funny if this guy wrote a sentence, and then, when he pushed DELETE, the subject of the sentence was deleted from the world?” Anyway, I started¬ exactly making up a story so much as seeing pictures in my head. I was watching this guy&delete pictures hanging on the wall, and chairs in the living room, and New York City, and the concept of war. Then I thought of having him insert things and having those things just pop into the world. “Word Processor of the Gods,” the story that resulted, is about a writer who is given a homebrew word processor as a gift from his favorite nephew shortly before the latter is killed in a car accident. Our protagonist, Richard, discovers that the machine has precisely the awesome (or ominous) powers described above: writing about a person or thing can bring it to life in the real world, and deleting the passage likewise causes the person or object to be summarily “erased” from existence.

Plumly's new collection of poetry, his tenth, confronts and celebrates mortality. Rita Dove calls Plumly "the successor to James Wright and John Keats, with a marvelous ear for the music of contemplation." Old Heart was named as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the National Book Award. You can read selected interviews with Plumly at Norton Poets Online.

Dvora Baron (1886-1956) was the first woman writer to have her Hebrew fiction canonized during the period of the Hebrew linguistic and cultural revival at the turn of the 20th century. Baron s representation of traditional Jewish culture, particularly women s culture, in experimental writing modes, has shed new light on the relationship between tradition and modernity in Eastern European Jewish society and in mandatory Palestine at the beginning of the twentieth century. Hebrew, Gender and Modernity: Critical Responses to Dvora Baron s Fiction aims to represent, for the first time in any language, the scope and diversity of the recent scholarly interest in Dvora Baron and her fiction. The anthology presents the work of leading scholars in the field of Jewish and Hebrew studies from Israel and the United States. This collaborative effort creates a dialogue leading to a new and innovative approach to the field of Modern Hebrew literature and culture.

Bringing together some of the best current practitioners of historical and formal criticism, Reading Renaissance Ethics assesses the ethical performance of renaissance texts as historical agents in their time and in ours. Exploring the nature and mechanics of cultural agency, the book explains with greater clarity just what is at stake when canon-formation, aesthetic evaluation and curricular reform and revised. Grossman writes the introduction, a chapter titled "Textual ethics: reading transference in Samson Agonistes," and co-writes, with Sharon Achinstein, a chapter titled "Ethics or politics?: an exchange passing through the Areopagitica." Department Professor of English Theodore Leinwand writes the afterword.

Like many of Howard Norman's celebrated novels, this intense and intriguingly unconventional love story begins with a crime. David Kozol has assaulted his father-in-law on a London street. What could possibly enrage David enough that he would strike the father of his new bride? Why would William, the gentle caretaker of an estate in Nova Scotia -- along with its flock of swans -- be so angry at the man who has just married his beloved daughter Maggie? And what would lead Maggie to believe that David has been unfaithful to her? At its core, Devotion is an elegantly constructed, unsparing examination of love in its various forms -- romantic, filial -- and of course, love for the vast open spaces of the natural world.

Dvora Baron (1887-1956) has been called "the founding mother of Hebrew women's literature." Born in a small town on the outskirts of Minsk to the community rabbi, Baron immigrated from the Jewish Pale of Settlement to Palestine in 1910. Although she was not the only woman writing in Hebrew in the first few decades of the twentieth century, Baron was the only woman to achieve recognition in the canon of Modern Hebrew fiction during that period. As such, her work reflects both the revolutionary and conservative qualities of the Modern Hebrew Renaissance. Rooted in the Jewish tradition and using the Hebrew language as its battle cry, the Modern Hebrew Renaissance can be said to have distinguished itself from its patriarchal past by fostering a woman's literary emergence. At the same time, the fact that Dvora Baron was the only woman writing in the first decades of the twentieth century who was included into the Renaissance's literary canon indicates the movement's resistance to its own potentially revolutionary nature. Sheila E. Jelen reveals how Baron viewed her own singularity and what this teaches us about the contours of the Modern Hebrew Renaissance - its imperatives and assumptions, its successes and failures. This is the first full-length, English language treatment of Baron's Hebrew corpus. It will be of interest to scholars of literary studies, gender studies, Jewish cultural studies, Jewish literary studies, and Hebrew literary studies.

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A controversial look at the most renowned person of African descent in the eighteenth century. In this widely acclaimed biography, Carretta gives us the authoritative portrait of Olaudah Equiano (c.1745-1797), the former slave whose 1789 autobiography quickly became a popular polemic against the slave trade and a literary classic. Carretta's unprecedented archival research reveals previously unknown details of Equiano's life. A masterpiece of scholarship and writerly poise, this book redefines an extraordinary man and the turbulent age that shaped him.

Richardson presents a study that explores in depth one of the most significant aspects of late modernist, avant-garde, and postmodern narrative. Unnatural Voices analyzes in depth the creation, fragmentation, and reconstitution of experimental narrative voices that transcend familiar first- and third-person perspectives. Going beyond standard theories that are based in rhetoric or linguistics, this book focuses on what Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Beckett and more recent postmodernists, actually do with narration.