Research & Innovation

"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.

"Alison Stine's best poems here are confessional and meditative sequences, but are shadowed by the tradition of dramatic narrative; they propose types of redemptive performance....Their white spaces are crucial to this ironic self appraisal, in which a lost, outcast belated family is assembled by invocation."--Robert Hill Long

F. Scott Fitzgerald's short stories are the most critically undervalued and ignored segment of his fiction. Despite the fact that most of his short fiction has been published in various extant collections, critics nonetheless continue to focus primarily on his novels. Moreover, even when they turn their attention to Fitzgerald's stories, they tend to deal with the half dozen most frequently anthologized to the exclusion of the vast majority.

This volume presents twenty-three previously unpublished essays on Fitzgerald's "other" stories. The first section contains close readings of individual stories and ranges chronologically over his entire career--from "The Spire and the Gargoyle" (published in 1917, when Fitzgerald was at Princeton) through such early efforts as "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" (1920) and "John Jackson's Arcady" (1924) down to late stories such as "An Alcoholic Case" (1937) and "The Lost Decade" (1939). The second section includes essays on Fitzgerald's three story groups--the Basil and Josephine stories, the Count of Darkness stories, and the Pat Hobby stories.

By placing these stories within the context of Fitzgerald's total fictional achievement, this collection serves as a resource for a deepened understanding of the intensely autobiographical nature of Fitzgerald's work, offering insights into his methods of composition and his aims, both artistic and human.

The roster of contributors includes long-time Fitzgerald critics such as John Kuehl, Scott Donaldson, and Ruth Prigozy, along with distinguished critics of modern American literature such as Robert Merrill, Alan Cheuse, and James Nagel, and younger scholars like Gerald Pike and Heidi Kunz Bullock. The editor, Jackson R. Bryer, deliberately chose such a diverse group to ensure a variety of critical perspectives. The resulting volume is not the "last word" on these neglected stories; rather, these are the "first words" on stories that will now begin to receive more attention in what will be a continuing discovery of the pleasures in the full range of F. Scott Fitzgerald's fiction.

The Neighbor is a book of portraits and portraiture. Like the eccentric and mysteriously heroic citizens of E.A. Robinson's Tilbury Town, Collier's figures haunt a startlingly familiar neighborhood. In clear, rich language, Collier reveals the complexities that emerge from his characters' seemingly uneventful lives.

DeFoe Russet works with his uncle Edward as a guard in Halifax's three-room Glace Museum. He and his uncle disturb the silence of the museum with heated conversations that prove them to be "opposites at life." Away from the museum, DeFoe courts the affection of Imogen Linny, the young caretaker of the small Jewish cemetery. Everything changes when Imogen, inspired by the arrival of a painting, Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam, abandons Halifax for the ennobled life she imagines for the painting's subject - even amid the gorwing perilousness of being a Jew in Amsterdam. Set against the impending events of World War II, The Museum Guard, the second book of his Canadian trilogy, explores the mysteries of identity and self-determination, and the desire to step our of the ordinary into an alluring and dangerous sphere of action.

Edited by Mary Burke, Jane Donawerth, Linda Dove, and Karen Nelson

Winner of the 2000 Award for Best Collaborative Project from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women

In Tudor and Stuart Britain, women writers were shaped by their culture, but they also helped to shape and reproduce culture through their writing, their patronage, and their networks of family and friends. Through the lens of cultural studies, the editors explore women's material culture, women as agents in reproducing culture, popular culture and women's pamphlets, and women's bodes as inscriptions of culture.

In addition to essays by the editors on Mary Queen of Scots, poetry and gift-exchange, Lady Mary Wroth's anti-absolutist sonnets, and Elizabeth Cary's portrait of the queen in Edward II, the book includes Georgianna Ziegler's description of Esther Inglis's gift books; Margaret Hannay on class in Pembroke's psalms; Mary Ellen Lamb on Aemilia Lanyer and patronage; Elaine Beilin on Anne Dowriche's Protestant history; Ilona Bell discussing the Maydsens of London; Barbara McManus on the pamphlet controversies about women; Esther Cope on Eleanor Davies; Marilyn Luecke on Elizabeth Clinton's Countess of Lincolnes Nurserie; Carole Levin on the assimilation of female saints into reformation England, and Kathi Vosevich describing the rhetorical training that Mary and Elizabeth Tudor received.