Research & Innovation

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This volume presents twenty-three previously unpublished essays on Fitzgerald's "other" stories.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.

"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

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.

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.

The standard account of Emmanuel Levinas’s work assumes his distance from classical phenomenology. Drabinski argues that Husserl was a vital resource for Levinas throughout his philosophical career. He documents Levinas' transformation of the Husserlian themes of time, materiality, intentionality, and sense, placing them centrally within Levinas' ethical work. What emerges in this book is a thorough account of Levinas’s constant and productive debate with the Husserlian tradition of phenomenology.