The Georgic Mode in Twentieth-Century American Literature: The Satisfactions of Soil and Sweat explores environmental writing that foregrounds labor. Ethan Mannon argues that Virgil's Georgics, as well as the georgic mode in general, exerted considerable influence upon some of America's best-known writers--including Robert Frost, Willa Cather, and ......
Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Writing Between Them: Turning the Table examines early draft manuscripts and published poems by Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in order to uncover the compositional approaches that they held in common. Both poets not only honed the minutiae of individual poems but also reworked the shape of overall sequences in order to ......
A fascinating new study of the face, form, and history of expression. Advances in facial recognition, artificial intelligence, and other technologies provoke urgent ethical questions about facial expressivity and how we interpret it. In The New Physiognomy, Rochelle Rives roots contemporary facial dilemmas in a more expansive timeline of ......
Redefines modern lyric poetry at the intersection of literary and media studies. In The Lyre Book, Matthew Kilbane urges literary scholars to consider lyric not as a genre or a reading practice but as a media condition: the generative tension between writing and sound. In addition to clarifying issues central to the study of modern ......
A collection of essays examining literary discussions of the role of science, focusing on the interactions between processes of knowledge formation and the socioeconomic and political spheres.
Explores literature and film about petroleum as a genre of world literature, focusing on the ubiquity of oil as well as the cultural response to petroleum in postcolonial states.
Comfort examines the works of five Francophone authors who wrote about World War I: Maxence Van der Meersch's Invasion 14, Colette's war reporting, Bakary Diallo's Force-Bonte, Blaise Cendrars's La Main coupee, and Roland Dorgeles's Le Reveil des morts. Engaging in a close reading, she analyzes what makes these literary works unique and what they ......
W.H. Auden at Work: The Craft of Revision explores revision in the poetry of W.H. Auden, focusing on Auden's early sonnet sequences, "A Voyage," and "Sonnets from China." It enumerates in great detail the substantial changes Auden made to those sequences over the course of thirty years. Auden's observations are an amalgam of abstract ......
Fictions of Proximity: Skepticism, Romanticism, and the Wallace Nexus tells the story of a nexus of contemporary novelists around David Foster Wallace who took up the legacy of logical positivism and reworked it between the 1980s and the 2000s in a way that has affinities with romanticism. The book shows how the writers of this 'Wallace nexus' use ......
