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Research & Innovation

Research in the arts and humanities represents a range of disciplines and distinctive modes of knowledge and methods that result in articles and books, ideas, exhibitions, performances, artifacts and more. This deliberate and dedicated work generates deep insights into the multi-faceted people and cultures of the world, past and present.
Whether individual or collaborative, funded or unfunded, our faculty are leading national networks and conferences, providing research frameworks, engaging students, traversing international archives and making significant contributions to UMD's research enterprise.
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Storm

The apparent normalcy of the world of these poems is a thin ice on which the speaker pauses, scarily, suspended over a turmoil of delusion, cruelty, and materialism, over our deepest personal and cultural terrors.

English

Dates:
Publisher: Blue Begonia Press
PLACE HOLDER TEXT

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Official Guide to Colonial Williamsburg

This was the first Official Guide to Colonial Williamsburg in over 40 years; first published in 1985, it has been frequently updated since.

English

Author/Lead: Michael Olmert
Dates:
Publisher: Colonial Williamsburg

This was the first Official Guide to Colonial Williamsburg in over 40 years; first published in 1985, it has been frequently updated since. It covers all the buildings in the historic area, including the 88 original Williamsburg structures (which were carefully restored) plus those that were reconstructed, in many cases, on original foundation footprints. The text is illustrated with line drawings of every historic building and its relationship to other structures along the town's four chief streets. In addition to architectural history, the text attempts to place the material culture of the town into the historical context of the Revolution as well as the lives of the families that lived and died in them--and their many slaves. Census documents show that Williamsburg was more than 50 percent African-American at the time of the Revolution. Illustrations, maps , and color photographs.

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With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women

Here -- in the only collection of speeches by nineteenth-century African-American women -- is the battle of words these brave women waged to address the social ills of their century.

English

Author/Lead: Shirley Wilson Logan
Dates:
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press

Here -- in the only collection of speeches by nineteenth-century African-American women -- is the battle of words these brave women waged to address the social ills of their century. While there have been some scattered references to the unique roles these early "race women" played in effecting social change, until now few scholars have considered the rhetorical strategies they adopted to develop their powerful arguments. In this anthology, Logan highlights the public addresses  of these women beginning with Maria W. Stewart's speech at Franklin Hall in 1832, believed to be the first delivered to an audience of men and women by an African-born woman. Introductory essays focus on each speaker's life and rhetoric, considering the ways in which these women selected evidence and adapted language to particular occasions, purposes, and audiences in order to persuade.

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A Reference Guide for English Studies

This text is an introduction to the full range of standard reference tools in all branches of English studies. More than 10,000 titles are included.

English

Author/Lead: Michael Marcuse
Dates:
Publisher: University of California Press
This text is an introduction to the full range of standard reference tools in all branches of English studies. More than 10,000 titles are included. The Reference Guide covers all the areas traditionally defined as English studies and all the field of inquiry more recently associated with English studies. British and Irish, American and world literatures written in English are included. Other fields covered are folklore, film, literary theory, general and comparative literature, language and linguistics, rhetoric and composition, bibliography and textual criticism and women's studies.

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"Doers of the Word": African-American Women Speakers & Writers in the North (1830-1880)

Adapting a verse from the Epistle of James, "doers of the word,” 19th-century black women activists Sojourner Truth, Jarena Lee, & Frances E. W. Harper, among others, travelled throughout the Northeastern, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwestern regions of the U.S.

English

Author/Lead: Carla Peterson
Dates:
Publisher: Oxford University Press

Adapting a verse from the Epistle of James - "doers of the word" - nineteenth-century black women activists Sojourner Truth, Jarena Lee, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, among others, travelled throughout the Northeastern, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwestern regions of the United States. They preached, lectured, and wrote on issues of religious evangelicism, abolition, racial uplift, moral reform, temperance, and women's rights, thereby defining themselves as public intellectuals. In situating these women wtihin the emerging African-American urban communities of the free North, Doers of the Word provides an important counterweight to the vast scholarship on Southern slavery and argues that black "Civil Rights movements" cannot be seen as a purely modern phenomenon.

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Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative

This first book-length study of causality and narrative investigates the complex web of causal issues present in all narratives and regularly probelmatized in twentieth century works.

English

Author/Lead: Brian Richardson
Dates:
Publisher: University of Delaware Press

This first book-length study of causality and narrative investigates the complex web of causal issues present in all narratives and regularly probelmatized in twentieth century works. These include the shifting laws of probability that attempt to govern fictional worlds, the reader's implication in the causal dilemmas that confront central characters, the contested relations between philosophic theories and fictional practices, and the role of cause in determining just what constitutes a narrative.

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Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity

The differences between Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany have been historically reduced to a simple binary pronouncement: assimilationist versus separatist. Now Levine restores the relationship of these writers to its original complexity.

English

Author/Lead: Robert S. Levine
Dates:
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press

The differences between Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany have been historically reduced to a simple binary pronouncement: assimilationist versus separatist. Now Levine restores the relationship of these two important nineteenth-century African American writers to its original complexity. He explores their debates over issues like abolitionism, emigration, and nationalism, illuminating each man's influence on the othe's political vision. Though each saw himself as the single best representative of his race, Douglass has been accorded that role by history -- while Delany, according to Levine, has suffered a fate typical of the black separatist: marginalization. In restoring Delany to his place in literary and cultural history, Levine makes possible a fuller understand of the politics of antebellum African American leadership.

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The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville

The essays herein have been specially commissioned for this volume, and provide a critical introduction and comprehensive overview of Melville's career.

English

Author/Lead: Robert S. Levine
Dates:
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

The essays herein have been specially commissioned for this volume, and provide a critical introduction and comprehensive overview of Melville's career. All of Melville's key works, including Moby-Dick, Typee, White Jacket, The Tambourine in Glory and The Confidence Man, are examined, as well as most of his poetry and short fiction. Written at a level both challenging and accessible, the volume provides fresh prerspectives on one of the most significant writers of nineteenth-century America whose work continues to fascinate readers and stimulate new study.

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The Story of All Things: Writing the Self in English Renaissance Narrative Poetry

This book analyzes the influence of major cultural developments, as well as significant events in the lives of Renaissance poets, to show how specific narratives characterize distinctive conceptions of the self in relation to historical action.

English

Author/Lead: Marshall Grossman
Dates:
Publisher: Duke University Press

This book analyzes the influence of major cultural developments, as well as significant events in the lives of Renaissance poets, to show how specific narratives characterize distinctive conceptions of the self in relation to historical action. Focusing on the narrative poetry of the English Renaissance, Grossman relates subjectivity to the nature of language, using the theories of Lacan to analyze the concept of the self as it encounters a transforming environment. He shows how ideological tensions arose from the reorganization and "modernization" of social life in revolutionary England and how the major poets of the time represented the division of the self in writings that are suspended between lyric and narrative genres.

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Nine Skies

Nine Skies is a graceful realization in each detail of elegy or celebration.

English, Center for Literary and Comparative Studies

Dates:
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
PLACE HOLDER TEXT