Research & Innovation

Against a background of Continental literary movements, Auchard explores the structures of silence in the novels and tales of Henry James. He develops their dynamics in terms of plot and action as he draws out their disturbing philosophical implications. The book relates James to the reaction against 19th-century materialism, which was symbolism, to the potency of decadence, to the century's pulses of mysticism, even to its wave of aestheticized Catholicism, and it brings James up to the edge of the modern abyss.In presenting the distinction between the symbolic richness of positive silences and the decadent void of negative silences, the work provides original scholarship of the highest order, both on James and on the extensive literature of silence, symbolism, and decadence. Silence in Henry James may indeed be a source of integrity, vitality, and fertility, but it plays out its subtle dialectic on the edge of nothingness and sometimes on the brink of collapse.

Critic, essayist, and anthologist Mary Helen Washington has chosen as the theme of her newest collection "the family as a living mystery." She selected nineteen stories and twelve poems by some of this century's leading black authors that oblige the reader to observe the complexities of the family in new and provocative ways.

What can a reassessment of this contentious first lady of American letters add to an understanding of the gay identities that have emerged in America over the past century? Although it has been proven posthumously by scholars that Cather had lesbian relationships, she did not openly celebrate lesbian desires, and even today is sometimes described as homophobic and misogynistic. As Lindemann shows in this study of the novelist's life and work, Cather's sexual coming-of-age occurred at a time when a cultural transition was recasting love between women as sexual deviance rather than romantic friendship. At the same time, the very identity of "America" was characterized by great instability as the United States emerged as a modern industrial nation and imperial power. 

This study examines emotional responses to socio-economic pressures in early modern England, as they are revealed in plays, historical narratives and biographical accounts of the period. These texts yield fascinating insights into the various, often unpredictable, ways in which people coped with the exigencies of credit, debt, mortgaging and capital ventures. Leinwand's new readings of texts by and about Shakespeare, Jonson, Massinger, the Earl of Suffolk, Walter Raleigh, Thomas Gresham, James Burbage, and Lionel Cranfield reveal a blend of affect and cognition concerning finance that includes nostalgia, anger, contempt, embarrassment, tenacity, bravado and humility.

Born in present-day Ghana, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano was kidnapped at the age of thirteen and sold into slavery by his fellow Africans in 1770; he worked in the brutal plantation chain gangs of the West Indies before being freed in England. His Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery is the most direct criticism of slavery by a writer of African descent. Cugoano refutes pro-slavery arguments of the day, including slavery's supposed divine sanction; the belief that Africans gladly sold their own families into slavery; that Africans were especially suited to its rigors; and that West Indian slaves led better lives than European serfs. Exploiting his dual identity as both an African and a British citizen, Cugoano daringly asserted that all those under slavery's yoke had a moral obligation to rebel, while at the same time he appealed to white England's better self.

Stowe's second antislavery novel was written partly in response to the criticisms of Uncle Tom's Cabin by both white Southerners and black abolitionists. In Dred (1856), Stowe attempts to explore the issue of slavery from an African American perspective. In his introduction, Robert Levine outlines the antislavery debates in which Stowe had become deeply involved before and during her writing of Dred. Levine shows that in addition to its significance in literary history, the novel remains relevant to present-day discussions of cross-racial perspectives.

In 1761, a young girl arrived in Boston on a slave ship, sold to a local family, and given the name Phillis Wheatley. Struck by Phillis' extraordinary precociousness, the Wheatleys provided her with an education that was unusual for a woman of the time and astonishing for a slave. Phillis published her first poem in 1767 at the age of 14, winning much public attention and considerable fame. This volume collects both Wheatley's letters and her poetry: hymns, elegies, translations, philosophical poems, tales, and epyllions.

Comprises nearly 400 authoritative yet accessible entries on canonical writers, key texts, genres, literary debates, colonized regions, and related terminology

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.

Melodic and firmly rooted in nature, Plumly's Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me: New and Selected Poems 1970-2000 deepens and sharpens the themes of his work. The result is a musical, multifaceted, and deeply moving series of poems-a panoramic view of thirty years of poetic inquiry.