Research & Innovation

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.

"Dark splendor" are the words Edward Hirsch uses to describe the poems of the award-winning author Michael Collier. Collier's new 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. They render the world beautifully mysterious as they slide into unexpected emotional territory. A son loses his father's favorite hammer, and with it his trust. In "The Wave," the enthusiastic crowd at a baseball game rises and sits in frightening unison, belying their hopeful cheering.

Although these studies are useful for explaining how these different genres work together or against one another, they do not help identify how narratives function differently when communicated through the medium of verse rather than prose. In this paper, I offer an alternative approach, one that expands on the work of several scholars.

Focusing on both British and Indian literary texts—primarily novels—produced between 1857 and 1947, Sangeeta Ray examines representations of "native" Indian women and shows how these representations were deployed to advance notions of Indian self-rule as well as to defend British imperialism.

A book-length sequence of poems, The Reef rockets the reader through a Heraclitean chute of accelerated life experience by way of anecdote, satire, facts from medical science, and lyrical sweep. This multilayered work explores the depths of illness, investigating the way one's attitude toward it changes over time and how one gathers and processes information in order to make sense of it.

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.

he common thread is that all these works are in—or can be slipped into—the category of letters from women to men who have abandoned or ignored them. Such real or feigned love letters (Kauffman insists on calling them "amorous epistolary discourse") form a coherent body of literature that is here profitably analyzed, though a reader may well feel that the sample is not only small, but also skewed. Kauffman subscribes so thoroughly to the current doctrine that literature grows out of other literature and has nothing to do with life that once, when she kicks over the traces a bit, she feels called on to defend herself against an assumed charge of "naive mimeticism."

In Special Delivery, Linda S. Kauffman places the narrative treatment of love in historical context, showing how politics, economics, and commodity culture have shaped the meaning of desire.

Investigating the role of fantasy in art, politics, and popular culture, she shows how technological advances in medicine and science (magnetic resonance imaging, computers, and telecommunications) have profoundly altered our concepts of the human body. Cyberspace is producing new forms of identity and subjectivity. The novelists, filmmakers, and performers in Bad Girls and Sick Boys are the interpreters of these brave new worlds, cartographers who are busy mapping the fin-de-millennium environment that already envelops us.

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.