Research & Innovation

Eighty years later he remains one of the most widely read American authors in the world. The first major critical study of London to appear in a decade, Male Call analyzes the nature of his appeal by closely examining how the struggling young writer sought to promote himself in his early work as a sympathetic, romantic man of letters whose charismatic masculinity could carry more significance than his words themselves. Jonathan Auerbach shows that London’s personal identity was not a basis of his literary success, but rather a consequence of it. Unlike previous studies of London that are driven by the author’s biography, Male Call examines how London carefully invented a trademark “self” in order to gain access to a rapidly expanding popular magazine and book market that craved authenticity, celebrity, power, and personality. Auerbach demonstrates that only one fact of London’s life truly shaped his art: his passionate desire to become a successful author. Whether imagining himself in stories and novels as a white man on trail in the Yukon, a sled dog, a tramp, or a professor; or engaging questions of manhood and mastery in terms of work, race, politics, class, or sexuality, London created a public persona for the purpose of exploiting the conventions of the publishing world and marketplace.

Whether discussing George Eliot’s lesbian readers, Anthony Trollope’s whorish heroines, or Charles Dickens’s masturbating characters, William A. Cohen’s study explodes the decorum of mainstream nineteenth-century fiction. By viewing this fiction alongside the most alarming public scandals of the day, Cohen exposes both the scandalousness of this literature and its sexiness. Scandal, then as now, makes public the secret indiscretions of prominent people, engrossing its audience in salacious details that violate the very code of propriety it aims to enforce. In narratives ranging from Great Expectations to the Boulton and Park sodomy scandal of 1870–71, from Eliot’s and Trollope’s novels about scandalous women to Oscar Wilde’s writing and his trials for homosexuality, Cohen shows how, in each instance, sexuality appears couched in coded terms. He identifies an assortment of cunning narrative techniques used to insinuate sex into Victorian writing, demonstrating that even as such narratives air the scandalous subject, they emphasize its unspeakable nature.

In this study of realist and modernist life writing, Caramello offers extended close readings of four biographical works by James and Stein: “acts” that served their authors primarily as “covers” for autobiography. Exploring themes of artistry and influence and experimenting with original forms of biographical portraiture, James and Stein used their biographical portraits of precursors and contemporaries to portray themselves as exemplary modern artists and, in the process, also constructed ideal literary genealogies for themselves.

(Expanded Edition) (Vol. One-Volume)

In this illuminating collection of essays, Michael Olmert explores how the most ordinary artifacts of everyday life can reveal a huge amount information about how history actually works.

Named one of the four best documentaries in the world by IDA in 1996.

Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Cesar, and Antony and Cleopatra—and demonstrates in each case how the play has retained its vitality, complexity, and appeal.

Winner of the Danish Oscar and the Silver Diploma of the Prix Futura, Berlin.

Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), one of the leading artists communities in the world with
locations in Amherst, Virginia, and Auvillar, France, hosts more than 400 visual artists, writers, and
composers each year. The artists who come to VCCA, whether emerging or established, are selected by peer review on the basis of the important or innovative work they are doing in their respective fields.

Fellowships recognize and reward the artistic achievements of South Carolina’s exceptional individual artists and are made through a highly competitive process.