Research & Innovation

Returning to the midwestern suburb of her childhood, Standardsville, Illinois, she contends with her dating single mother, a neighbor who once appeared on The Honeymooners, and an ex-boyfriend. She also becomes a "mystery shopper" for a temp agency, posing as a variety of potential tenants for newly built suburban communities to assess their exclusive services. Enchanted by the possibilities of disguise, Isabelle spins a web of lies that keeps the world at a distance until she unearths long-kept secrets that force her to rethink everything she thought she knew.

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Auerbach's book explores the fictions of three 19th-century writers--Poe, Hawthorne, and James--in which the first-person narrator is both the central actor and the retrospective teller of tale, at once hero and historian. Auerbach argues that first person is an attractive but dangerous form of self-revelation that foregrounds fundamental problems of literay representation such as how fiction come to be made, and the relation between these plots and the people who make them.

Granted access by the Tolkien estate and the Bodleian Library to Tolkien's unpublished writings, Flieger uses them here to shed new light on The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, revealing a new dimension of his fictive vision and giving added depth of meaning to his writing. Tolkien's concern with time - past and present, real and "faërie" - captures the wonder and peril of travel into other worlds, other times, other modes of consciousness. Reading his work, we "fall wide asleep" into a dream more real than ordinary waking experience, and emerge with a new perception of the waking world. A Question of Time places Tolkien firmly in the mainstream of modern writers, and should appeal to anyone interested in imaginative fiction.

Beginning with the birth of science fiction in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Jane Donawerth takes a broad look at science fiction and utopian literature written by women. In a creative close reading of Frankenstein, Donawerth pinpoints the gender problems that reside in the male-oriented science fiction genre. Employing feminist, social and cultural theory, Donawerth identifies new forms of science fiction that emerge from women writers as they address the problems of the genre. The range of works by women makes this volume an invaluable scholarly review of the entire field of feminist science fiction and criticism.

Lanyer was a middle-class Londoner of Jewish-Italian descent and the mistress of Queen Elizabeth's Lord Chamberlain. But she is remembered today as the first Englishwoman to publish a substantial volume of original poems (1611). Her output is varied, subtle, provocative, and witty. The essays in this volume establish the intrinsic merit of Lanyer's poetry and use her work to interrogate her male contemporaries, Donne, Jonson, and Shakespeare. As a whole the collection offers a sustained discussion of the processes of canonization and the construction of literary history.

Logan analyzes the distinctive rhetorical features in the persuasive discourse of nineteenth-century black women, concentrating on the public discourse of club and church women from 1880 until 1900. Logan develops each chapter in this illustrated study around a feature of public address as best exemplified in the oratory of a particular woman speaker of the era. Analyzing speeches, editorials, essays, and letters, Logan focuses on Maria Stewart, Frances Harper, Ida Wells, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Anna Cooper. The book includes an appendix with little-known speeches and essays by representative rhetoricians.

 

"Dark splendor" are the words Edward Hirsch uses to describe the poems of the award-winning author Michael Collier. Collier's work balances on the ledge between the everyday and the unknown, revealing the hidden depths of relationships. The poems in The Ledge are narrative and colloquial, musical and crystalline, at once intimate and sharp-edged. The artistry and directness of The Ledge confirm his place among the most significant poets of his generation.

The World's Room is a dynamic first collection in which the literary and the personal, the elevated and the slangy, the sacred and the profane are beautifully intertwined. From nursery rhymes to riddles to prose poems, Joshua Weiner's work displays boundless imaginative and linguistic possibilities.

Documents the journey of two black American bluesmen, Archie Edwards and John Cephas, as they carry their musical heritage to the world.