Research & Innovation

"Without any posturing, Judith Skillman's are dramatic poems, whose power derives from the play of opposing tensions. They set the meticulous eye that records external phenomena against the highly original-at times almost surrealistic-sensibility that makes arresting connections and transitions between outer and inner landscapes. The lucid urbane voice of these poems is skillfully deployed to make what might otherwise sound imaginatively extravagant seem eminently reasonable"-William Dunlop

Fahnestock breaks new ground in the rhetorical study of scientific argument as the first book to demonstrate how figures of speech other than metaphor have been used to accomplish key conceptual moves in scientific texts. Examples, both verbal and visual, range across disciplines and centuries to reaffirm the positive value of these once widely-taught devices.

Flieger's expanded and updated edition of Splintered Light, a classic study of Tolkien's fiction first published in 1983, examines The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings in light of Owen Barfield's linguistic theory of the fragmentation of meaning. Flieger demonstrates Tolkien's use of Barfield's concept throughout his fiction, showing how his central image of primary light splintered and refracted acts as a metaphor for the languages, peoples, and history of Middle-earth.

Joseph Conrad's first novel is a tale of personal tragedy as well as a broader meditation on the evils of colonialism. Set in the lush jungle of Borneo in the late 1800s, it tells of the Dutch merchant Kaspar Almayer, whose dreams of riches for his beloved daughter, Nina, collapse under the weight of his own greed and prejudice. Nadine Gordimer writes the introduction.

In White Summer, Joelle Biele investigates the problems of personal and cultural memory. Rich with images of flight and displacement, Biele’s poems show a love for words, their music and physicality. In lyric addresses, historical meditations, and autobiographical narratives, she takes readers on a journey that includes stops at a dinner party in ancient Rome, a market square in Germany, an Italian feast in the Bronx, and the main concourse of Manhattan’s Grand Central Station. She shows a sharp eye for the telling detail whether she is studying the migrations of birds or sketching portraits of people wishing to escape the confines of their lives. Throughout her first collection, Biele reveals and revels in the power of language to shape and create experience.

Mary Fred Anderson, raised in an isolated fundamentalist sect whose primary obsessions seem to involve an imminent Apocalypse and the propagation of the name "Fred," is hardly your average fifteen-year-old. She has never watched TV, been to a supermarket, or even read much of anything beyond the inscrutable dogma laid out by the prophet Fred. But this is all before Mary Fred's whole world tilts irrevocably on its axis: before her brothers, Fred and Freddie, take sick and pass on to the place the Reverend Thigpen calls "the World Beyond"; before Mama and Papa are escorted from the Fredian Outpost in police vans; and Mary Fred herself is uprooted and placed in foster care with the Cullison family. It is here, at Alice Cullison's suburban home outside Washington, D.C., where everything really changes -- for all parties involved.

In this accessible, lucid volume, Berlin brings her considerable knowledge of Hebrew poetry to bear upon the study of Lamentations. She explicates the book's five poems, their 'theology of destruction,' their expression of suffering without limits, and she builds a convincing case for Lamentations' immense power to address violence and grief. In our current cultural climate of anger and sorrow, Berlin's book will be of interest to all thinking people.

The Whiting Award is an American award presented annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and plays.

This anthology brings together essential essays on major facets of narrative dynamics, that is, the means by which "narratives traverse their often unlikely routes from beginning to end." It includes the most widely cited and discussed essays on narrative beginnings, temporality, plot and emplotment, sequence and progression, closure, and frames. Includes essays by E.M. Forster on story and plot; Vladimir Propp on the structure of the folktale; M.M. Bakhtin on the chronotope; Nancy K. Miller on plot and plausibility; Edward Said on beginnings; Jacques Derrida on the frame; among others.