HarperPerennial, 2006

On an ordinary morning in Fox Harbor, Wisconsin, Meg and Rex Van Dorn's lives are irrevocably altered when a drunk driver—Meg's onetime best friend, Cindy Ann Kreisler—slams into the Van Dorns' car, killing their six-year-old son, Evan. As Meg recovers from her own injuries, she and Rex are shocked when Cindy Ann receives a mere slap on the wrist. In their rage and grief, they buy a boat to sail around the world, hoping to put as much distance as possible between themselves and Cindy Ann. But when Meg returns to Fox Harbor for a family wedding, she's forced to face the complex ties that bind her to the woman who has destroyed her peace.

HarperPerennial, 2002

From childhood, acclaimed novelist A. Manette Ansay trained to become a concert pianist. But when she was nineteen, a mysterious muscle disorder forced her to give up the piano, and by twenty-one, she couldn't grip a pen or walk across a room. She entered a world of limbo, one in which no one could explain what was happening to her or predict what the future would hold. At twenty-three, beginning a whole new life in a motorized wheelchair, Ansay made a New Year's resolution to start writing fiction, rediscovering the sense of passion and purpose she thought she had lost for good. Thirteen years later, still without a firm diagnosis or prognosis, Ansay reflects on the ways in which the unraveling of one life can plant the seeds of another, and considers how her own physical limbo has challenged—in ways not necessarily bad—her most fundamental assumptions about life and faith. Luminously written, Limbo is a brilliant and moving testimony to the resilience of the human spirit.

HarperPerennial, 2000

April Liesgang and Caleb Shannon have known each other for three short months, so their Valentine's Day wedding at a chapel near the shores of Lake Michigan has both families in an uproar. As the festivities unfold (and the cash bar opens), everyone has an opinion and a lively prediction about April and Caleb's union, each the reflection of a different marital experience. Meanwhile, at the nearby Hideaway Lodge, a domestic quarrel ends in tragedy. As April and Caleb's life together begins, death parts another man and woman in angry violence—and as the two stories gradually intersect, their juxtaposition explores the tangled roots of vulnerability and desire. By the time the last polka has been danced and the bouquet tossed, Midnight Champagne has cast an extraordinary spell. From its opening epigraph from Chekhov—“If you fear loneliness, then marriage is not for you"—to its final moments in the honeymoon suite, A. Manette Ansay weaves tenderness and fury, passion and wonder into a startling tapestry of love in all its paradox and power.

HarperPerennial, 1998

In her first full-length story collection, author A. Manette Ansay explores the rural Midwest landscape and the people who inhabit it: ordinary folk with extraordinary inner lives, struggling to make sense of the isolated, sometimes painful, and often intensely religious worlds in which they live. Here are 15 haunting and exquisitely written tales that offer a rare and unforgettable glimpse into the complexities of being human and being alive.

Avon, 1998

Many citizens of Ambient, Wisconsin, believe the old tales of an angel living in the Onion River that runs through the heart of their town. Some claim to have seen it, "small and white as a seagull, hovering just above the water." It is this belief that leads a misfit ten-year-old boy to the river's edge one cold winter's night, where he encounters a band of troubled teenagers from the local high school, out drinking and driving around. Gabriel Carpenter vanishes that night, presumed drowned, though the teenagers tell different—and conflicting—stories. And when dawn comes, his lifeless body is found by Ruthie Mader in a barn a mile away. "His body was warm when I touched it," she says. "There was a small like flowers. And when I saw him there, I thought he was just sleeping." No one in this quiet Midwestern community can agree whether a miracle or a hoax has occurred. But as the story spreads, and curious tourists overrun the town—some skeptical, others reverent, still others angling for financial gain—one fact becomes certain beyond any doubt: life here will never be the same.

HarperPerennial, 1997

About to become a mother, 30-year-old Abby is compelled to look back at her own roots and try to come to terms with her unhappy, frequently violent family history. As children on a Wisconsin farm, Abby and her brother Sam lived in perpetual fear of their father's harsh mockery and his firm enforcement of the only social code he could accept, according to which the girl's place is in the home and the boy must live up to a rigid, narrow idea of "masculinity." The teenage Abby, offered an alternate world of faith and order, is able to survive; Sam, with no safe haven from his father's bullying, descends into a world of violence and hatred and, at the age of 17, disappears from home. Haunted by guilt, rejecting not only her family's code but their Catholic faith, Abby, too, moves away. Years later, and in spite of her new, peaceful life, Abby is still unable to put her turbulent emotions to rest. It is not until the secret of Sam's disappearance is uncovered that she finally comes to terms with her parents, her Catholic upbringing and her feelings of responsibility for her brother. Sister is the poignant story of a woman's search for memory and meaning, the reconciliation of present and past.

HarperPerennial, 2006

In a stark, troubling, yet ultimately triumphant celebration of self-determination, award-winning author A. Manette Ansay re-creates a stifling world of guilt and pain, and the tormented souls who inhabit it. It is 1972 when circumstance carries Ellen Grier and her family back to Holly's Field, Wisconsin. Dutifully accompanying her newly unemployed husband, Ellen has brought her two children into the home of her in-laws on Vinegar Hill—a loveless house suffused with the settling dust of bitterness and routine—where calculated cruelty is a way of life preserved and perpetuated in the service of a rigid, exacting and angry God. Behind a facade of false piety, there are sins and secrets in this place that could crush a vibrant young woman's passionate spirit. And here Ellen must find the strength to endure, change, and grow in the all-pervading darkness that threatens to destroy everything she is and everyone she loves.

Gangster Priest: The Italian American Cinema of Martin Scorsese

University of Toronto Press, 2007

Widely acclaimed as America’s greatest living film director, Martin Scorsese is also, some argue, the pre-eminent Italian American artist. Although, he had explored various subjects throughout his lengthy career, the core of his achievements includes five films on Italian American subjects – Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, Mean Streets, Raging Bull, GoodFellas, and Casino. - as well as the documentary Italianamerican. In Gangster Priest Robert Casillo examines these films in the context of the religion, culture, and history of southern Italy and of its people, from whom the majority of Italian Americans, including Scorsese, descend.

The Empire of Stereotypes: Germaine De Staël and the Idea of Italy

Palgrave MacMillan, 2006

In Corinne, or Italy, as in On Literature, Germaine de Staël not only draws from the tradition of Northern European stereotypes of Italy and the Italians, but transmits their influence to nineteenth-century writers and artists. These ambiguous and typically negative representations, which are examined historically in the works of travel writers over nearly three centuries, are shown to be in many instances more than simply subjective constructs, but rather the partial consequence of the decline of Italy from the later seventeenth century up to the Risorgimento. Their deeper implications are considered in relation to prior studies of the Italian national character by Leopardi, Barzini, Bollati, Sciolla, and Tullio-Altan, Burke’s “historical anthropology of modern Italy,” Norbert Elias’s formulation of the “civilizing process,” and various theories of alterity and violence, including those of Said, Bakhtin, Natalie Zemon Davis, and René Girard.

Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound

Northwestern University Press, 1988

In The Genealogy of Demons, Robert Casillo argues that the fascism and anti-Semitism of Ezra Pound were not, as many of his defenders have wished, accidental or circumstantial—incomprehensible and unfortunate eccentricities in the life of an otherwise fine poet. Instead, Casillo believes, fascism is the very bone and sinew of Pound’s work. He shows, for example, how the critics of the 1940’s (who supported the awarding of the prestigious Bollingen Prize to Pound’s Pisan Cantos) protected Pound by invoking the theory that poetry is a mode of discourse which is impervious of the statement of ideas. Casillo demonstrates that anti-Semitism and fascism inform at virtually every point the inner logic, and meaning, the metaphors, and the theories of language present in the Cantos. In order to restore Pound’s poetry to the context out of which it grew, Casillo draws extensively on the history of European right-wing thought as well as on recent literary and cultural theory, particularly the anthropological speculations of René Girard. The result is a picture of Ezra Pound which will disturb Pound’s admirers while reopening crucial questions about the relationship of literature to ideology.

Blake's Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in the Four Zoas

SUNY Press, 1997

Blake's Nostos establishes The Four Zoas, Blake's controversial, unfinished epic, as the culmination of the poet's mythos. Kathryn S. Freeman shows that, in its freedom to experiment with nontraditional narrative, this prophetic book is Blake's fullest representation of nondual vision as it coexists with the material world. Blake's scheme of consciousness eliminates the Enlightenment hierarchy of faculties in a structure centered around a nondual vision operating through and subsuming the fragmented world. The author draws on the analogue of Eastern philosophy to describe Blake's nondualism. According to this interpretation of Blake's epic, consciousness itself is the hero whose nostos is the apocalyptic return to wholeness from the multiple ruptures that comprise the fragmenting journey of Albion's dualistic dream. Blake's Nostos demonstrates that for each of the central elements of myth—causality, narratology, figuration, and teleology—Blake superimposes such dual and nondual perspectives as time and eternity as well as bounded space and infinity.

Coffee House Press, 1996

The stories in Her Wild American Self focus on Filipina Americans - recent immigrants or first generation – and explore what it is to be American and female. Each character struggles with careers, motherhood, sisterhood, and roles within family and society, including the stereotype of the subservient Asian American woman. Neither fully accepting nor rejecting their Eastern and Western traditions, the characters in this collection attempt to come to terms with their bicultural upbringing. Ranging from the title story about a teenager who comes of age and falls from grace all in one tumultuous season, to a story about an artist who finds her medium and leaves her lover, to a story such as the one about a forty-two year old who realizes she has succeeded in establishing herself as her own woman, Her Wild American Self contains a rich and engaging mosaic of stories about contemporary Filipina American women.

New Issues, 2006

Winner of the AWP Prize for the Novel

In One Tribe, the death of Isa Manalo’s unborn child stirs wide spread speculation in her small Midwestern suburb. Fed up with the noise of local tsismosas (gossips), she moves to Virginia Beach to teach myth and history to Filipino American youth. Isa Manalo walks into the chaos of drive by shootings, beauty pageants, and community politicking. At every turn she butts heads with youth gangs who distrust her, community elders who disapprove of her loose outsider ways, and a Filipino boyfriend who accuses her of acting too white. Eventually Isa fights back. As Hurricane Emilia brews at the edge of the east coast, Isa opens her house to a local girl gang and nourishes their troubled spirits, instigating change sudden as the shift of tropical winds.

Coffee House Press, 2003

When a restaurant review referred to a Filipino child as a "rambunctious -little monkey," Filipino Americans were outraged. Sparked by this racist incident, Screaming Monkeys sets fire to Asian American stereotypes as it illuminates the diverse and often neglected history and culture within the Asian American diaspora. Poems, essays, paintings, and stories break down and challenge "found" articles, photographs, and headlines to create this powerful anthology with all the immediacy of social protest. By closely critiquing a wealth of material, including the judge's statement of apology in the Wen Ho Lee case, the media treatment of serial killer Andrew Cunanan, and the image of Asian Americans in major U.S. marketing campaigns, Screaming Monkeys will inspire all its readers.

Picador, 1999

On a spring day in 1968, Pittsburgher Daly Racklin discovers that he has one year to live. An attorney and the reluctant linchpin of a dying Irish neighborhood, culture, and people, he is at once a man torn by his father's omnipotent shadow and the struggles of his own heart. As his elevated position brings him from one home to another, he increasingly discovers the importance of what he sees disappearing. Bing Crosby's Last Song is a funny, touching, heart-wrenching story of survival and love, a community's demise and a wanderer's rebirth.

Kent State University Press, 1999

In this, his third collection of stories, Lester Goran moves us again through the times and places indelibly stamped with his wit and insight about people and events lost to history. Outlaws of the Purple Cow centers around the domains of Irish-American men and women in Pittsburgh. Goran creates once more his world of poignant and magical times and places within the mundane affairs of ordinary men and women. Goran’s evocative settings and narratives range from the supernatural to the humorous, from bawdy to richly detailed realism. Goran, with his mastery of language and images, chronicles in stories the unheralded laughters and sorrows of Americans seldom noted in fiction.

Kent State University Press, 1997

Lester Goran's first book of short stories, Tales from the Irish Club, was chosen by the New York Times Book Review as a “Notable Book of the Year 1996.” This second collection also centers around a group of men and women in an Irish-American enclave in Pittsburgh, primarily during the years surrounding World War II, but extending at times into the eighties. With evocative settings and narratives ranging from the supernatural to the humorous, from bawdy hilarity to richly detailed realism, Goran creates once more his world of poignant and magical times and places within the mundane affairs of ordinary men and women. With his mastery of language and images he shows again what Paul West has termed “the lunatic sadness of things.”

Kent State University Press, 1996

“Tales from the Irish Club presents a group of stories so well imagined that one can hardly tell them apart from life… They are meant to be overheard, not heard, as if the reader were a child at a wedding eavesdropping on someone’s loquacious, slightly drunken aunt… I abandonned the Hibernian world of Lester Goran’s Pittsburgh with a sense of loss. Closing his book felt like driving away from my own boyhood city after a large Thanksgiving dinner, with improbable stories still echoing in my head. Tales from the Irish Club is a memorable work.”—New York Times Book Review

Kent State University Press, 1994

The Bright Streets of Surfside chronicles 10 years in the life of Isaac Bashevis Singer, as witnessed and shared by a fellow writer close to him at the time. In 1978, with a mixture of hero worship and academic responsibility as director of creative writing at the University of Miami, Lester Goran brought Singer to teach at the Coral Gables campus. The eminent Polish-American author was then 74 years old and five months away from receiving the Nobel Prize. Goran became Singer's closest friend and translator as they taught advanced courses in creative writing together until Singer retired in 1988. With a sometimes painful authenticity, Goran recounts the course of their extraordinary friendship. It was a fascinating time, writes Goran, recalling his frustration at Singer's intractable desire not to teach (he mistrusted the faculty and was bewildered by the students) and his pleasure in Singer's company. Touching and humorous, the memoir offers a rare opportunity to learn about this influential Yiddish writer who often concealed his real beliefs, feelings, and personal history from the public. Goran tells the tale with an honesty that is unsparing of his own dilemmas while it is deeply sympathetic to a great writer at odds with himself and his time. Looking frankly at a crucial time in his own life as a writer, Goran derives some understanding of the moral dimensions of Singer's art as he was menaced by the burdens of loss, age, and fame. Goran discusses Singer's philosophies about his life and art, his works in progress, and his lifelong devotion to literature. In addition, he offers his own reflections on working with the last grand Yiddish novelist and on his role in keeping Yiddish alive.

Stanford University Press, 1993

In developing a new gender theory for analyzing Samuel Richardson’s three major novels—Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison—Gwilliam argues that these novels of sexual threat expose, sometimes unwillingly, the extraordinary labor required to construct and maintain the eighteenth-century ideology of gender, that apparently natural dream of perfect symmetry between the sexes. 

The instability of that model is revealed notably in Richardson’s fascination with cross-gender identification and other instances of transgressive desires. Gwilliam demonstrates that these violations of the supposedly unbreachable barriers between masculinity and femininity produce what is most moving and imaginative in Richardson’s fiction and create an equally powerful repression in the form of punishment of transgressive characters and desires. She also illustrates, through a reading of recurrent fantasies about the composition of bodies—especially women’s bodies—the complex interaction between those fantasies and the construction of masculinity and femininity.

The genesis of Richardson’s own writing is located in a dynamic, reciprocal idea of gender that allows him to see femininity from the inside while retaining the privileges of the masculine viewpoint; the relation between this origin and the novels themselves forms the basis for the discussions of the novels.

Gender, Sexuality, and Material Objects in English Renaissance Verse

Ashgate, 2010

An important contribution to recent critical discussions about gender, sexuality, and material culture in Renaissance England, this study analyzes female- and male-authored lyrics to illuminate how gender and sexuality inflected sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets' conceptualization of relations among people and things, human and non-human subjects and objects. Pamela S. Hammons examines lyrics from both manuscript and print collections—including the verse of authors ranging from Robert Herrick, John Donne, and Ben Jonson to Margaret Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson, and Aemilia Lanyer—and situates them in relation to legal theories, autobiographies, biographies, plays, and epics. Her approach fills a crucial gap in the conversation, which has focused upon drama and male-authored works, by foregrounding the significance of the lyric and women's writing.

Hammons exposes the poetic strategies sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English women used to assert themselves as subjects of property and economic agents—in relation to material items ranging from personal property to real estate—despite the dominant patriarchal ideology insisting they were ideally temporary, passive vehicles for men's wealth. The study details how women imagined their multiple, complex interactions with the material world:the author shows that how a woman poet represents herself in relation to material objects is a flexible fiction she can mobilize for diverse purposes.

Because this book analyzes men's and women's poems together, it isolates important gendered differences in how the poets envision human subjects' use, control, possession, and ownership of things and the influences, effects, and power of things over humans. It also adds to the increasing evidence for the pervasiveness of patriarchal anxieties associated with female economic agency in a culture in which women were often treated as objects.

Poetic Resistance: English Women Writers and the Early Modern Lyric

Ashgate, 2002

Poetic Resistance contributes to the booming field of early modern women writers by contextualizing and analyzing a unique configuration of underexamined women's texts. By investigating how seventeenth-century English women's composition of lyrics intersects significantly with the social experiences of those women, Poetic Resistance challenges scholarly assumptions that have limited attention to early modern women's writing, calls attention to little-known examples of women's poetry, expands our understanding of what might count as “social” verse, illustrates how women have added their own creative innovations to the history of the lyric form, and reveals the power of lyrics in women's reconceiving or changing of potentially damaging social roles. Although Poetic Resistance concentrates upon early modern lyrics—both in manuscript and print—it also treats plays, epics, prose polemics, conversion narratives, religious treatises, newsbook articles, and Biblical texts in building its arguments. Furthermore, it combines the study of women writers such as Katherine Philips, Aemilia Lanyer, Gertrude Aston Thimelby, Mary Carey, Anna Trapnel, and Katherine Austen with that of men such as William Shakespeare, John Milton, Ben Jonson, and Robert Herrick. Poetic Resistance shows how early modern women poets were able to write verse that enabled them to reshape very specific, constrictive, gender-based social roles—in particular, the roles of mother, female prophet or holy handmaid, and widow—while also making distinct contributions to English literary history.

Bedside Seductions: Nursing and the Victorian Imagination, 1830-1880

Palgrave Macmillan, 1997

During the Victorian era, the status and meaning of the nurse experienced remarkable and telling shifts. Bedside Seductions is the first book-length exploration into the significance of the nurse in mid-Victorian literary and social history. By carefully sifting through legal, medical, and literary sources including novels, newspaper articles, and private letters, Catherine Judd reveals how the changing perceptions of the nurse during mid-Victorian times allow for fascinating insights into issues of class, gender, and race in this period. She shows how, from the early to mid-nineteenth century, the nurse developed as a fulcrum for public perceptions regarding sex and class, consolidating for Victorian writers fundamental political and social anxieties—especially concerns over class conflict, public health, the “Woman Question,” female heroics, and the construction of middle-class sexuality. Judd critically assesses icons such as Florence Nightingale as constructed ideals of womanhood, service and war duty, and the related notions concerning medicine, domestic ideology, and sexuality. Beside Seductions is an absorbing and stimulating analysis that shares new insights into the Victorian era.

Crazy Melon and Chinese Apple: The Poems of Frances Chung

Wesleyan University Press, 2000

This posthumous collection of the poetry of France Chung depicts daily life in New York’s Chinatown during the 1960s and ‘70s with unparalleled perception, aesthetic refinement, and compassion. Crazy Melon deftly sketches the streets, fantasies, commerce, and toil of Chung’s neighborhoods, while the later Chinese Apple offers new themes and cityscapes–delightfully understated eroticism, tributes to poets, impressions of other Chinese diasporic communities around the world. Essays by the editor explain how the manuscripts were compiled and organized and suggest their many levels of meaning within histories of poetry, labor, and linguistic and cultural identification.

‘“Yo vivo en el barrio Chino,” Frances Chung announces in the opening line of her posthumous (and first) collection of poems. The line is like much of her work–direct in voice and intensely personal in subject matter. Yet her identity is one that is always being refracted through the larger world. Chung, who grew up on the border between New York City's Chinatown and Little Italy, died in 1990 at the age of 40, leaving behind assorted manuscripts in various stages. This collection's editor, Walter K. Lew, has done an admirable job of drawing them together into a book that is rich with images and Chung's vital, vibrant voice.’ — New York Times Book Review

Excerpts from: ΔIKTH DIKTE, for DICTEE (1982)

Yeul Eum Sa, 1991

‘Lew’s “critical collage” invents a new genre of creatively expressive, multimedia scholarship and was largely responsible for the resurgence of interest in the work and life of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, the author of DICTEE. Long out of print, Excerpts could fairly be said to have achieved the same kind of cult status as DICTEE itself has among scholars and practitioners of contemporary poetry, Asian American literary studies, and performance texts.’ —Maria Damon, author of The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry

Kôri: The Beacon Anthology of Korean American Fiction

Beacon Press, 2001

‘Editors Fenkl and Lew explain that the title of their cornerstone anthology of Korean American fiction refers to the phases of a Korean shamanic ritual, or an “intersecting of one world with the other.” Worlds do indeed overlap in the novel excerpts [and short stories] assembled here, cultural clashes the editors carefully explicate in their clarifying introduction. … Kôri presents a sampling of highly literary and profoundly moving voices integral to the moody song that is America.’ —Donna Seaman, Booklist

“A splendid and useful anthology, tastefully deployed and edited with historical range, literary verve, and critical care.” —Rob Wilson, University of California, Santa Cruz

Muae One

Kaya, 1995

Selected by Library Journal as one of the top ten new periodicals of 1995. “As handsome as it is smart, Muae cuts new roads through uncharted territories that are now opening up between cultures once thought to be unconnected. [It] points readers toward the next century, when the distinctions between categories like poetry, politics, and painting will have blurred to create fresh complexities.” —Albert Mobilio, The Village Voice Literary Supplement

Premonitions: An Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry

Kaya, 1995

‘Overall, the most vibrant area of American poetry may be that represented in another recent anthology, Walter K. Lew’s Premonitions. [This] collection of experimental multicultural poetry represents a significant departure from earlier collections of Asian American poetry.... Unlike those anthologies, Lew’s collection goes beyond “conventional models of verse” to encompass the “many ways in which language is drastically reshaped into fresh articulations, ranging from video collage and highly compressed prose poems to cyberpunk critiques of ethnic mimicry.” […] Premonitions offers one of the most encouraging signs that there is a future for poetry in North America. The combination of the linguistic and formal energies of the avant-garde or experimental tradition with the transcultural and interpersonal energies of an expanded racial and ethnic context seems to be generating a more radical and more innovative practice than either one is capable of creating and sustaining in isolation.’ —Christopher Beach, in Poetic Culture: Contemporary American Poetry between Community and Institution

Treadwinds: Poems and Intermedia Texts

Wesleyan University Press, 2002

Finalist for the 2003 PEN Center USA poetry award and winner of the Sixth Annual Literary Award of the Asian American Writers Workshop. ‘This collection, culled from over 20 years of writing, puts forth a unique mixture of traditional, even ancient, poetic styles that extends across cultures: one poem is called “Two Handfuls of Waka for Thelonious Sphere Monk (d. 1982),” while another peels off politically charged lexemes in a “Language” vein: “mudlight / moontruck / bloodhope / bonegun.” “Intermedia” work includes several pages from Lew’s out-of-print “critical collage” on [Theresa Hak Kyung] Cha’s work, weird phonetic translations of poems in Japanese script, and the title poem, which is accompanied by several collages by filmmaker and animator Lewis Klahr. Further leaps across continents, time periods, and narrative angles include a spooky ekphrastic meditation on the paintings of Francis Bacon, light-hearted narrative montages, prose poems, and quasi-magical-realist lyrics.... This eclecticism is all held together by Lew’s measured pace, lively sense of enjambment, condensed imagery and impatience with the facile wordplay that sinks other poetry covering similar themes. It fills in an important corner not only of Lew’s multifaceted career but the larger portrait of Korean and Asian-American literature of the past two decades.’ —Publishers Weekly

Contesting Cultural Rhetorics: Public Discourse and Education, 1890-1900

University of Michigan Press, 1995

Contesting Cultural Rhetorics demonstrates how “education” fuctions as a contested term and a set of contested practices in American culture because it is inevitably linked to highly contested, value-laden terms. Marshall's analysis employs a range of contemporary theorists and draws on a number of disciplinary perspectives where scholars have been examining discursive practices and where rhetoric is understood to be a means of examining cultural conceptions and embedded ideologies. Through these lenses she examines four influential and popular texts of the 1890s that serve to illuminate current public debates on education: Joseph Mayer Rice's exposé of public schools; Matthew Arnold's government report on schools in Europe; W. E. B. DuBois's Atlantic Monthly essay on teaching in the New South; and Jane Addams' essay on the function of social settlements.

Taken together, these texts reveal the complicated public discussion of education in the 1890s—a period of transformation in culture, schooling and the organization of knowledge. Moreover, they reveal the rhetorical structure of many of the questions Americans continue to ask about education today: who should be educated, by whom, for what purposes, using what methods and materials?

Response to Reform: Composition and the Professionalization of Teaching

Southern Illinois University Press, 2004

Interrogating the approach the education system takes to certify teachers without actually “professionalizing” their careers, Marshall contends that these programs rely on outdated rhetorics of labor that only widen the gap between teaching and other professional jobs. Such attempts to reeducate literacy teachers exploit and marginalize their work, and thus prevent them from claiming the status of academic professionals. In providing an overview of the history, language and arguments that have been used to characterize literacy instruction, she also points out that while women are overrepresented in composition instruction, they are underrepresented in tenure track and administrative positions.

To correct and combat these inequities, Marshall advocates an alternate alignment of power structures and rhetorical choices. In a wide-ranging survey that sheds new light on the composition workplace as well as higher education at large, Response to Reform: Composition and the Professionalization of Teaching asks us to do away with the inherited and reductive language that characterizes teaching, particularly the teaching of literacy, and rethink our customary responses to public criticism of education. The result is a new articulation of composition as a meritorious profession.

Forests of Symbols: World, Text, and Self in Malcolm Lowry’s Fiction

University of Georgia Press, 1994

Forests of Symbols addresses Malcolm Lowry’s dependence on writing for his sense of identity and his fear that the process of composition would leave him with no identity apart from his work. McCarthy looks not only at ways in which acts of reading, writing, and interpretation define Lowry’s characters but also the threat they pose to those characters’ sense of a coherent identity. In particular, he examines the extent to which autobiographical characters like the Consul, in Under the Volcano, embody problems inseparable from Lowry’s anxiety about his status in relation to the world around him and to the texts (his own and others’) that played so great a role in his concept of his identity. McCarthy contends that Lowry’s difficulty in completing his writings stemmed from his conflicting urges to continue and to finish: to keep open the infinite play of meanings and yet to create a coherent and balanced work that embodies the author’s identity.

National Library of Ireland, 2005

In this brief study, Patrick A. McCarthy examines the role of the family in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) as a means of approaching the book’s complex characterization and narrative structure. McCarthy argues that families play a crucial role in Joyce’s fiction because they are inseparable from the world he knew and that while in theory the narrative of Finnegans Wake is infinitely expandable, at its core there is a fundamental set of human relationships that Joyce associates with the family.

University Press of Kentucky, 1997

James Joyce was a central figure of high modernism; Malcolm Lowry spoke for the next generation of modernist writers and, despite his denials, was almost certainly influenced by Joyce. The contributors to Joyce/Lowry examine the relationship of these two expatriate writers, both to each other and to broader issues in the study of literary modernism and its aftermath. This collection embraces a variety of approaches to both writers' work. Each essay places Joyce and Lowry in some larger context and arrives at insights that would not otherwise have been apparent.

University of Georgia Press, 1996

La Mordida is a draft of a novel based on Malcolm Lowry's visit to Mexico in 1945-46, which ended in the arrest and deportation of Lowry and his wife following a nightmarish run-in with corrupt immigration authorities. The title La Mordida—“the little bite", Mexican slang for the small bribe that officials are apt to demand in order to expedite matters—refers to the autobiographical protagonist's legal difficulties, but it also represents his inability to escape his past by repaying the fine. La Mordida is also a metafictional work about an author who sees no point in living events if he cannot write about them, and who not only is unable to write but also suspects that he is just a character in a novel. This volume, based on Lowry’s typescripts, manuscripts, and notebooks, includes an introduction and extensive annotations.

Twayne, 1982

This volume was the first full-length study of the British science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950), author of such innovative novels as Last and First Men, Odd John, Star Maker, and Sirius. McCarthy examines all of Stapledon’s fiction, focusing both on their examination of the human condition and their bold experiments with narrative form. In the conclusion he considers the relationship between Stapledon’s work and that of three other writers: C.S. Lewis, Arthur C. Clarke, and Stanislaw Lem.

Wesleyan University Press, 2004

One of the true classics of science fiction, Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker (1937) is a poetic and deeply philosophical work in which an unnamed narrator is transported not only to other worlds but also other galaxies and parallel universes, until he eventually becomes part of the “cosmic mind.” Stapledon’s descriptions of alien life are both a meditation on the relation of humanity to the cosmos as a whole and a political commentary on human life in the turbulent 1930s. Star Maker challenges preconceived notions of intelligence and awareness and argues for a broadened perspective to free us from culturally ingrained thought. This is the first scholarly edition of a book that influenced such writers as C.S. Lewis and Arthur C. Clarke and which Jorge Luis Borges called “a prodigious novel.” In addition to a scrupulously edited text of the novel the volume includes a foreword by the physicist Freeman Dyson as well as McCarthy’s introduction and annotations.

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980

In this study of Finnegans Wake, James Joyce’s last and most radically innovative work, Patrick A. McCarthy uses the book’s many riddles as a means of approaching theme and structure in the Wake. Introductory chapters consider the traditional uses of riddles in myth and folklore in relation to the Wake riddles and examine Joyce’s use of riddles in Ulysses; subsequent chapters are devoted to close examination of specific riddles and riddling situations.

Twayne, 1990

Patrick A. McCarthy examines ways in which James Joyce’s Ulysses demands a parallactic response from readers. McCarthy explores contending versions of the truth in Ulysses and points to such issues as stylistic arrangements of reality, the reliability of evidence in the novel, and the depiction of the central character, Leopold Bloom, as a fallible reader to illustrate his thesis that the novel revolves around the reader’s encounter with the text. McCarthy also explores such crucial elements of the novel as Joyce’s complex presentation of racial and ethnic identity and the roles that error and rumor play in the narrative.

University Press of New England, 2002

This interdisciplinary study explores the evolving representations of diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American writing from 1880 to the late 20th century. Beginning with the often neglected proto-Zionist verse of Emma Lazarus, through the urban and Holocaust-inflected lyrics of Marie Syrkin and Charles Reznikoff, to the post-assimilationist novels of Philip Roth in the 1990s, Ranen Omer-Sherman analyzes literary responses to the competing claims on the self made by this dual allegiance. He explores ethnic nationalism in the works of Lazarus; history and identity in the prose and verse of Syrkin and her husband Reznikoff; and considers the Jewish writer's relation to the loss of diasporic affliction as an organizing principle for Jewish life in the novels of Roth. Much more than just literary criticism, Omer-Sherman shows how this literature developed in direct relation to crucial phases in Jewish acculturation in the context of nativism, xenophobia, the holocaust, and a beckoning distant homeland.

"The tension between Diaspora Jewish identity and the rise of political and cultural Zionism in the United States played itself out as much in the world of American Jewish culture as in the world of politics. Ranen Omer-Sherman uses four case studies: Lazarus, Syrkin, Reznikoff and Roth, to illustrate the complex history of a Jewish identityon the American frontier. The span of the book is breathtaking, its execution, elegant."

—Sander L. Gilman, Director, The Humanities Laboratory, The University of Illinois , Chicago

Israel in Exile: Jewish Writing and the Desert

University of Illinois Press, 2006

Israel in Exile is a bold exploration of how the ancient desert of Exodus and Numbers, as archetypal site of human liberation, forms a template for modern political identities, radical skepticism, and questioning of official narratives of the nation that appear in the works of contemporary Israeli authors including David Grossman, Shulamith Hareven, and Amos Oz, as well as diasporic writers such as Edmund Jabès and Simone Zelitch. Omer-Sherman ultimately argues that the ancient encounter with the desert acquires a new sense of urgency and relevance to the crisis brought about by national identities and territorial conflicts. A wide-ranging discussion of the special relationship between the sacred and the political, and between place and narrative.

The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches

Edited by Samantha Baskind and Ranen Omer-Sherman

Rutgers University Press, 2008

In the 1970s and 1980s Jewish cartoonists such as Will Eisner were some of the first artists to use the graphic novel as a way to explore their ethnicity. Although similar to their pop culture counterpart, the comic book, graphic novels presented weightier subject-matter in more expensive packaging, which appealed to an adult audience and gained them credibility as a genre. The Jewish Graphic Novel is a lively, interdisciplinary collection of essays which addresses critically acclaimed works in this subgenre of Jewish literary and artistic culture. Featuring interviews and insightful discussions of notable figures in the industryÑsuch as Will Eisner, Art Spiegelman, and Joann SfarÑthe essays focus on the how graphic novels are increasingly being used in Holocaust memoir and fiction, and to portray Jewish identity in North America, Europe, and Israel. With more than 85 illustrations, this collection is a compelling representation of a major postmodern ethnic and artistic achievement.

"The graphic novel is a vital and emerging genre, and this is the only book that focuses on its relation to Jewish culture, literature, and history. A highly readable and informative collection that will be of great interest to readers across a wide range of disciplines." --Deborah R. Geis, editor of Considering MAUS: Approaches to Art Spiegelman's "Survivor's Tale" of the Holocaust

G.K. Hall, Macmillan, 1993

Palmeri’s introduction sets forth the theory he established in Satire in Narrative that Swift’s writing is essentially dialogical, with signed, publicly acknowledged works, expressing an official, politically conservative point of view and with another body of satiric parodies, not formally acknowledged, expressing radically subversive perspectives. Palmeri sees these conflicting voices as often implying self-parody, the parodies being “inverted opposites” of official discourse, including Swift’s own.

Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture: Hybridity, Representation, Ethics

Ashgate, 2006

Combining historical and interpretive work, this collection examines changing perceptions of and relations between human and nonhuman animals in Britain over the long eighteenth century. Persistent questions concern modes of representing animals and animal-human hybrids, as well as the ethical issues raised by the human uses of other animals. From the animal men of Thomas Rowlandson to the part animal-part human creature of Victor Frankenstein, hybridity serves less as a metaphor than as a metonym for the intersections of humans and other animals. The contributors address such recurring questions as the implications of the Enlightenment project of naming and classifying animals, the equating of non-European races and nonhuman animals in early ethnographic texts, and the desire to distinguish the purely human from the entirely nonhuman animal. Gulliver's Travels and works by Mary and Percy Shelley emerge as key texts for this study. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students who work in animal, colonial, gender, and cultural studies; and will appeal to general readers concerned with the representation of animals and their treatment by humans.

Satire in Narrative: Petronius, Swift, Gibbon, Melville, and Pynchon

University of Texas Press, 1990

Most theories of satire argue that satire criticizes the present in favor of a standard of values that has been superseded, that the genre is generally backward–looking and conservative. While this is often true of poetic satire, in this study Frank Palmeri asserts that narrative satire parodies both the established view of the world and that of its opponents, offering its own distinctive critical perspective. This theory of satire builds on the idea of dialogical parody in the work of Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, while revising Bakhtin’s estimate of carnival. In Palmeri’s view, the carnivalesque offers only an inverted mirror image of authoritative discourse, while parodic narrative satire suggests an alternative to both the official world and its inverted opposite. Palmeri applies this theory of narrative satire to five works of world literature, each of which has generated sharp controversy about the object of its satire: Petronius’ Satyricon, Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. He analyzes the features that link these works and shows how the changing pairs of alternatives that are parodied in these satires reflect changes in the terms of social and cultural oppositions. Satire in Narrative speaks to comparatists, specialists in eighteenth-century and American literature, and those interested in theories of genre and relations between literary forms and social history.  

Satire, History, Novel: Narrative Forms, 1665-1815

University of Delaware Press, 2003

Displacing “the novel” from the central position it has held in studies concerned with the origin or rise of the English novel, Satire, History, Novel considers novelistic forms as part of a network of complementary and competing genres, including conjectural histories and narrative satires, and regards relations among these forms as most significant and revealing. This is the first book to explore the emergence—and the fading—of narrative genres in the context of successive cultural paradigms and the uneven development of public spheres. Analyzing works written over a century and a half in three national cultures, including canonical literature by Swift, Fielding, Burney, Voltaire, Diderot, and Goethe; less familiar but important and influential narratives by Delariviere Manley, Prevost, and Wieland; almanacs and popular novels by Courtilz de Sandras and Defoe; as well as philosophical and conjectural histories by Hume, Rousseau, Gibbon, and Kant, Satire, History, Novel contributes to intellectual history, public spheres studies, theories of narrative, scholarship on eighteenth-century literature and culture, as well as the relations of literature and philosophy to their historical contexts.

Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and Self-Representation

University of Wisconsin Press, 2002

Despite the range and abundance of autobiographical writing from the Anglophone Caribbean, this book is the first to explore this literature comprehensively. It covers works from the colonial era up to the contemporary AIDS memoir and assesses the links between more familiar works by George Lamming, C. L. R. James, Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, and Jamaica Kincaid and less frequently cited works by the Hart sisters, Mary Prince, Mary Seacole, Claude McKay, Yseult Bridges, Jean Rhys, Anna Mahase Sr., and Kamau Brathwaite. Sandra Pouchet Paquet charts the intersection of multiple, contradictory viewpoints of the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean, differing concepts of community and levels of social integration, and a pattern of both resistance and accommodation within island states that were largely shaped by British colonial practice from the mid-seventeenth through the mid-twentieth century. The texts examined here represent the entire range of autobiographical practice, including the slave narrative and testimonial, written and oral narratives, spiritual autobiographies, fiction, serial autobiography, verse, diaries and journals, elegy and parody. 

University of Michigan Press, 1991

Written when Lamming was twenty-three and residing in England, In the Castle of My Skin (1953) poignantly chronicles the author’s life from his ninth to his nineteenth year. Through the eyes of a young boy the experiences of colonial education, class tensions, and natural disaster are interpreted and reinterpreted, mediated through the presence of the old villagers and friends who leave for the mainland. One of the leading Black writers of the twentieth century, George Lamming is the author of numerous works exploring the colonial experience. Sandra Pouchet Paquet’s foreword brilliantly locates this classic novel in the main currents of contemporary autobiographical discourse, as well as the discourses of postcolonialism, diaspora, and transatlantic studies.

Music, Memory, Resistance: Calypso & the Caribbean Literary Imagination

Coedited with Patricia Saunders and Stephen Stuempfle

Ian Randle Publishers, 2007

Selected essays from the Calypso and the Caribbean Literary Imagination Conference jointly sponsored by Caribbean Literary Studies at the University of Miami and the Historical Museum of South Florida. Contributors include Gordon Rohlehr, Michael Eldridge, Louis Regis, Ray Funk, Hollis Liverpool, Earl Lovelace, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Funso Aiyejina, Paula Morgan, Jennifer Rahim, Kezia Page, Andrea Shaw, Cynthia Davis, and Claire Westall with an introduction by Patricia Saunders and a preface by Sandra Pouchet Paquet and Stephen Steumpfle. These essays first appeared in a special issue of Anthurium 3.2 scholar.library.miami.edu/anthurium

Heinemann, 1982

This is the first comprehensive study of the novels of George Lamming. Lamming is a political novelist of the first order. His novels are characteristically concerned with the structure of power and its effects on the moral, social, cultural and aesthetic values of individuals at all levels of society. This study devotes a chapter to each of Lamming’s six novels ranging from his Caribbean classic In the Castle of My Skin to two of the most outstanding political allegories in the twentieth century: Water with Berries and Natives of My Person.

University of Michigan Press, 1992

Originally published in 1960, The Pleasures of Exile explores the cultural politics and relationships engendered in the crucible of colonization through a series of interrelated essays. Drawing on Shakespeare’s The Tempest and C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins, as well as his own fiction, his long sojourn in Britain and travels through Africa and the United States, Lamming deftly locates the reader in the specific intellectual and cultural domain of the times and in the process produces a remarkable document to which we can return repeatedly for a critical understanding of the historical moment. In so doing, he anticipates major currents in contemporary postcolonial and atlantic discourses of migration, marginalization, and charts the limits of transnationalism. In her foreword to this classic text, Sandra Pouchet Paquet locates Lamming at the center of anti-colonial and contemporary postcolonial discourses. Beyond this, with an intellectual and cultural specificity modeled on Lamming’s intricate textual arrangement, she traces the main currents of an intellectual tradition that produced the creative genius of the twentieth-century Caribbean.

The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989

A pioneering critic, educator, and poet, I.A. Richards (1893–1979) helped the English-speaking world decide not only what to read but how to read it. Acknowledged “father” of New Criticism, he produced the most systematic body of critical writing in the English language since Coleridge. His method of close reading dominated the English-speaking classroom for half a century. Yet until now his life has remained unexplored, in part because his text-oriented approach—adopted by the New Critics—banned biography from discussion of an author’s work. John Paul Russo breaks this silence, drawing on close personal acquaintance with Richards as well as on unpublished materials, correspondence, and interviews, to write the first biography of one of this century’s most influential and many-sided men of letters.

The Future Without a Past: The Humanities in a Technological Society

University of Missouri Press, 2005

Winner of the 2006 Thomas N. Bonner Award

John Paul Russo goes beyond currently given reasons for the decline of the humanities and searches out its root causes in the technologization of everyday life. His main premise is that we are undergoing a transformation at the hands of technological imperatives such as rationalization, universalism, monism, and autonomy. Technological values have actually eroded human values instead of being “humanized” by them. What are the implications of this shift for the humanities, traditionally seen as safeguards of the human? Russo addresses this question by situating the decline of the humanities within the larger social and historical panorama. He explores how technological values have infiltrated the humanities to the point of weakening their instruction and undermining their force; at the same time, he shows how the humanities have confronted these trends and can continue to do so.

Music, Memory, Resistance: Calypso & the Caribbean Literary Imagination

Coedited with Sandra Paquet and Stephen Stuempfle

Ian Randle Publishers, 2007

Selected essays from the Calypso and the Caribbean Literary Imagination Conference jointly sponsored by Caribbean Literary Studies at the University of Miami and the Historical Museum of South Florida. Contributors include Gordon Rohlehr, Michael Eldridge, Louis Regis, Ray Funk, Hollis Liverpool, Earl Lovelace, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Funso Aiyejina, Paula Morgan, Jennifer Rahim, Kezia Page, Andrea Shaw, Cynthia Davis, and Claire Westall with an introduction by Patricia Saunders and a preface by Sandra Pouchet Paquet and Stephen Steumpfle. These essays first appeared in a special issue of Anthurium 3.2 scholar.library.miami.edu/anthurium

With Denise Duhamel

Tia Chucha Press, 1997

The French Surrealists invented a game called Exquisite Corpse to write collaborative poems, and thus the title of Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton's new book of poetry, "Exquisite Politics," hints at its collaborative nature. The result of years of individual and collaborative writing, these inspired poems speak at times in a breezy, conversational style, and at other moments with taut lyric intensity, probing the mysteries of relationships, personal histories, and issues of sexual and political identity. (Tia Chucha)

The Eighth Mountain Press, 1991

Winner of the Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize

With a combination of intellect and street smarts, Seaton has fashioned an intriguing volume of poetry depicting the hardship of contemporary urban life. Her poems move among their topics—homelessness, diaspora, sexism, racism—with the determination of a subway car moving between stations. She tirelessly investigates her role as a white woman in black people’s lives, particularly in the life of one black woman, whom she loves. By doing so, Seaton adds to the necessary cargo of politics in poetry. (Selman)

University of Iowa Press, 1996

Winner of the Iowa Prize and Lambda Literary Award

By turns chic, romantic, sardonic, droll, seductive, and in your face, Maureen Seaton is a cornucopia of attitudes and styles, a street-smart, deeply talented woman who wryly contemplates the charades that the self and the world assume—and how hard it is to stay in focus the morning after. It gets very, very hot in Seaton's kitchen and in her poems. Seaton creates curious and energetic juxtapositions; she revisits violence and assesses its damages. The poet/woman in the thick of this caldron instigates polarities and assumes the roles of inquisitor and heretic, perpetrator and child, painter and artifact, scientist and specimen. She careens circularly through the hypocrisies and atrocities of church and partner, established sanctioned realities, the seeming senseless death of loved ones in this life and long ago. (Iowa)

Invisible Cities Press, 2001

Her register is enormous, her verbal daring and wayfaring breathtaking; while the solidity of her skill—whether in renewing received prosody or in formal invention—underpins a worldview that might otherwise be vertiginously frightening. Little Ice Age, her fourth book, is a marvel. She writes so much that has not been written, that has needed utterance—in poetry or prose: about violence and eroticism, about women’s desire, about the intersection of emotions, mathematics, and history, and she writes it indelibly. (Hacker)

With Denise Duhamel

Pearl Editions, 2002

Struck with the way a sonnet encapsulates a narrative—it seemed to us that a single sonnet could tell a very long story in just fourteen lines—we thought: They're like little novels!...The muse took over from there. (Seaton)

Thorngate Road, 1998

Individually, each prose poem speaks to the heart and to the brain simultaneously, each as much at home in the realm of the emotions as it is in the realm of the intellect. Gathered together, they serve as a feisty testament to the power, the vision, and the craft of one of the very best of our contemporary poets. (Elledge)

Pearl Editions, 2000

The two poets are having so much fun with the language it rubs off on the reader. They’re funny and they’re smart and they’re fast…and they’re proving how mjuch vitality there is in collaboration as an avant-garde ideal and a New York School tradition. (Lehman)

New Rivers Press, 1992

Winner of the Capricorn Award and the Society of Midland Authors Award

The Sea among the Cupboards is full of the struggles of growing up and family life and raising children as a single mother. But it is also about the unusually creative searching of a woman who is trying to live her life well, and all the while being attentive to epiphanies of grace, joy, art, and celebration. (Styers)

Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2004

Winner of the Audre Lorde Award

A collection that is unsettling, vivid, and packed with profound images. It is ultimately a beautifully narrated, hauntingly detailed message to the living. (Mathews)

Hebraica Veritas? Christian Hebraists and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe

Coedited with Allison P. Coudert

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004

The twelve essays in Hebraica Veritas? address the important early modern encounter between Christians and Jews. They illustrate how these often complex intellectual, religious, and cultural encounters shaped each group's self-perception and sense of otherness and contributed to the emergence of the modern study of cultural anthropology, comparative religion, and Jewish studies. But the chapters also reveal how the encounter challenged traditional religious beliefs, fostering the skepticism, toleration, and irreligion conventionally associated with the Enlightenment.

Many of the Christian Hebraists described in these essays were linguists and textual critics, and their work highlights the ambiguous role played by language and texts in transmitting natural and divine truth. It was during the early modern period that numerous concepts underpinning modern Western secular society came into existence, and as Hebraica Veritas? shows, the subject of Christian Hebraism has direct relevance to understanding the intellectual changes and challenges characterizing the transition from the ancient to the modern world.

Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, & Christianity

Columbia University Press, 2001

Winner of the American Academy of Jewish Research Salo Baron Prize for First Book in Jewish Studies

Taking as its starting point the long-standing characterization of Milton as an “Hebraic” writer, Milton and the Rabbis probes the limits of the relationship between the seventeenth-century English poet and polemicist and his Jewish antecedents. Shoulson’s analysis moves back and forth between Milton’s writings and Jewish writings of the first five centuries of the Common Era, collectively known as midrash. In exploring the historical and literary implications of these connections, Shoulson shows how Milton’s text can inform a more nuanced reading of midrash just as midrash can offer new insights into Paradise Lost.

The Meaning of Irony: A Psychoanalytic Investigation

SUNY Press, 1994

Stringfellow combines literary analysis with psychoanalytic theory and case studies to investigate conscious and unconscious irony in everyday speech and in literature. He argues that the rhetorical tradition, by viewing the literal level of irony as something the speaker does not mean, flattens the ambiguities and misses hidden meanings.

G.K. Hall, Prentice-Hall International, 1996.

Spenser studies, as much as Shakespeare studies, has been one of the fields in the literature of the English Renaissance most receptive to innovative theoretical approaches. Literary theory, especially psychoanalytic and feminist theory, has at times been criticized in the abstract for being transhistorical in its claims and not sufficiently historicized; but critics of Spenser using these approaches have been alive to contemporary contexts, such as Reformation iconoclasm and Spenser’s negotiation of his relationship to a female sovereign and patron. And scholars who align themselves with the New Historicism have succeeded in elucidating the embeddedness of Spenser in Elizabethan political and social culture.

Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500-1700

Coedited with Cristina Malcolmson

Palgrave Macmillan, 2002

This book explores the construction of gender ideology in early modern England through an analysis of the "querelle des femmes"—the debate about the relationship between the sexes that originated on the continent during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and developed in England into the Swetnam controversy. The volume contextualizes the debate in terms of its continental antecedents and elite manuscript circulation in England, then moves to consider popular culture and printed texts, its effects on women's writing and the developing discourse on gender, and concludes by examining the ramifications of the debate during the Civil War and Restoration. Essays focus on the implications of the gender debate for women writers and their literary relations, cultural ideology and the family, and political discourse and ideas of nationhood.

Diversifying the Discourse: The Florence Howe Award for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship, 1990-2004

Coedited with Roseanna Dufault

Modern Language Association, 2006

The Florence Howe Award for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship, created in 1974, has played a major role in establishing the legitimacy and visibility of feminist inquiry. This volume presents the seventeen essays that won the award for the years 1990-2004, an era that witnessed a diversification of the objects of feminist study and critical approaches. Essays treat authors ranging from well-known writers such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Gwendolyn Brooks, Doris Lessing and Virginia Woolf, to less familiar writers such as Magreb writer Assia Djebar, the Spanish poet Concha Méndez, the Native American writer Zitkala-Ša, and the Palestinian novelists Liana Badr and Sahar Khalifeh. Essayists explore their topics through a multiplicity of perspectives, including race and ethnicity studies, psychoanalysis and film theory, nationhood and nationalism, and discourses of aging.

Ashgate, 2007

Elizabeth Cellier, known as the “Popish midwife,” became the focus of a large number of pamphlets in 1680: accounts of her two trials, her self-vindication, Malice Defeated, her opponent Thomas Dangerfield's rejoinder, and various anonymous satiric attacks against her. She was tried twice: the first time for the more serious charge of treason, and the second for libel, for publishing Malice Defeated. She was acquitted the first time, but found guilty the second, though her punishment was to be pilloried, not executed. She reemerges as the author of tracts on midwifery, proposing to James II the establishment of a professional guild of midwives. Her writings exhibit her remarkable determination to publish her accusations of judicial torture and her advocacy of the licensing of midwives as professional women, as well as exemplifying the importance of the printing press for enabling women to participate in the political public sphere.

Ashgate, 2007

Mary Carleton, commonly known as the German Princess, was a scandalous celebrity in Restoration London. Her notoriety arose from her 1663 trial and acquittal for bigamy, which became the occasion of the publication of The Case of Madam Mary Carleton. Here she narrates her version of her life as the daughter of the Earl of Cologne, though by most accounts she was born Mary Moders, the daughter of a Canterbury fiddler who married a Canterbury shoemaker, and then a surgeon. Within her own time, Carleton was the subject of more than twenty-six pamphlets published in 1663 and 1673. Her trial produced a “pamphlet war” between Mary and her husband John and her story inspired a play and a mock epic, which significantly responded to Carleton's own emphasis on performance and epic romance in fashioning her aristocratic identity.

Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic

Cornell University Press, 1989, 1993

Metamorphoses of Helen sheds light on a literary tradition that seemingly holds Helen of Troy and her descendants responsible for causing epic conflicts, while it appropriates the woman's perspective as a source of insight and poetic power. Focusing on examples from both classical and Renaissance epic—the Iliad and the Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Spenser’s Faeire Queene, and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida—Suzuki draws on anthropological theories of sacrifice and scapegoating to demonstrate that epic community among males is founded upon the exclusion or destruction of female characters. She explores the contradiction within each epic between the dominant patriarchal perspective and the perspective of the female victim of scapegoating. After the Iliad, Suzuki asserts, these epic poets mystify Helen as a figure for the authority of epic tradition and underscore their difference from previous poets through their enabling representation of their own “daughters” of Helen.

Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary Form in England, 1588-1688

Ashgate, 2003

Considering as evidence literary texts, historical documents, and material culture, this interdisciplinary study examines the entry into public political culture of women and apprentices in seventeenth-century England, and their use of discursive and literary forms in advancing an imaginary of political equality. Subordinate Subjects traces to the end of Elizabeth Tudor's reign in the 1590s the origin of this imaginary, analyses its flowering during the English Revolution, and examines its afterlife from the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 to the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89. It uses post-Marxist theories of radical democracy, post-structuralist theories of gender, and a combination of political theory and psychoanalysis to discuss the early modern construction of the political subject. Subordinate Subjects makes a distinctive contribution to the study of early modern English literature and culture through its chronological range, its innovative use of political, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories, and its interdisciplinary focus on literature, social history, political thought, gender studies, and cultural studies.

Women’s Political Writings 1610-1725 (4 vols.)

With Hilda Smith and Susan Wiseman

Pickering and Chatto, 2007

This new collection makes available, for the first time, a wide variety of women’s political writings from the seventeenth century. The four-volume edition highlights the principles inherent in female political action such as women’s Civil War petitioning and Quaker women’s efforts to reform prison and tithing practices. Exploring a range of authors and writings, including manuscript materials never before published, the work shifts the critical focus from the domestic to the political, providing a major re-evaluation of women’s writings from this period.

Stephen and Bloom at Life's Feast: Alimentary Symbolism and the Creative Process in James Joyce's "Ulysses"

Ohio State University Press, 1984

The creative process has been recognized as a central concern in all of James Joyce’s fictions. However, the most fully discussed aspects have involved the images of the artist as priest and alchemist. Both partake in transformational processes--the priest who for Joyce transmutes “the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life,” and the alchemist who magically deploys earthly substances and celebrates the interrelations of different forms of matter. This study focuses on Joyce’s interest in third cluster of mages, namely those related to the alimentary processes, and argues that Joyce, in his careful delineation of the responses of Stephen and Bloom to bodily functions—ingestive, digestive and excremental, establishes important linkages between language, ritual and art itself.

Textual Escap(e)ades: Mobility, Maternity, and Textuality in Contemporary Fiction by Women

Greenwood, 1994

This study explores the ways that contemporary women writers respond to problems of mobility, how they subvert plot conventions based on the oedipal configuration, how they combine and transform genre and myth, and how they mobilize language. Using both feminist and psychoanalytic theory, this study seeks to address questions of mobility in relation not only to the maternal presence, but also to the body itself and the constitution of the speaking subject within symbolic systems over which she has little control. Writers have been selected to represent both very different narrative styles—from the mimetic to the postmodern—and to represent difference in terms of race, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation.