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The Oxford Handbook of American Drama
2014Jeffrey H. Richards (Editor) and Heather S. Nathans (Editor)
When one thinks of American Drama, names like Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams readily come to mind. However, as The Oxford Handbook of American Drama shows, the U.S. has a deep and varied tradition that extends back to the years before the Revolutionary War. The essays gathered here trace U.S dramatic history, ranging from plays by Mercy Otis Warren to Tony Kushner… [From Amazon.com]
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Loving The L Word: The Complete Series in Focus
2013Dana Heller (Editor)
The complete and groundbreaking The L Word is now out on DVD and this book makes the perfect companion, covering the series in its entirety. Loving The L Word picks up where Reading The L Word: Outing Contemporary Television (I.B. Tauris, 2006) left off. With new, updated chapters by many of the same television writers and scholars who contributed to the first volume, as well as essays by some newcomers, Loving The L Word explores the series' quantum contribution to the ongoing evolution of queer television. [Amazon.com]
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Hoosiers: The Poems
2013Philip Raisor
Winner of the 2013 Palooka Press Chapbook Contest, Philip Raisor's book is fire in your hands. The war of sport. The having of dreams and the loss of them, dropped from the same hands that palm basketballs, carry rifles, attempt to erase the squiggly race lines of the '50s and '60s. He played with Wilt Chamberlain and against Oscar Robertson, but the real story here is in the flame of words, the way they burn in your stomach, in your mind, in your heart for so long after reading them. [from Palookamag.com]
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Swimming in the Shallow End: Poems
2013Philip Raisor
Swimming in the Shallow End is narrative poetry at its best, a verse memoir that examines the archetypal American conflict between the desire to stay and the passion to go. Take any community; every street, in and out, is crowded with the dreams and frustrations of characters who seek their identities on the road or in their favorite diners. In an exchange of stories between the narrator who returns like the prodigal son and his wayfaring friend, the worlds of the Bronx and Paris and Hanoi are not far from Muncie, Indiana. Like William Carlos Williams' Rutherford, New Jersey, and B.H. Fairchild's Liberal, Kansas, Philip Raisor's Middletown is a neighborhood pool that never seems long or deep enough, but grows in memory and the imagination... [Amazon.com]
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The Game Culture Reader
2013Jason C. Thompson (Editor) and Marc A. Ouellette (Editor)
In The Game Culture Reader, editors Jason C. Thompson and Marc A. Ouellette propose that Game Studies—that peculiar multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary field wherein international researchers from such diverse areas as rhetoric, computer science, literary studies, culture studies, psychology, media studies and so on come together to study the production, distribution, and consumption of games—has reached an unproductive stasis. Its scholarship remains either divided (as in the narratologists versus ludologists debate) or indecisive (as in its frequently apolitical stances on play and fandom). Thompson and Ouellette firmly hold that scholarship should be distinguished from the repetitively reductive commonplaces of violence, sexism, and addiction. In other words, beyond the headline-friendly modern topoi that now dominate the discourse of Game Studies, what issues, approaches, and insights are being, if not erased, then displaced? [From the publisher]
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Red Ink: Native Americans Picking Up the Pen in the Colonial Period
2012Drew Lopenzina
Reexamines the writings of early indigenous authors in the northeastern United States. The Native peoples of colonial New England were quick to grasp the practical functions of Western literacy. Their written literary output was composed to suit their own needs and expressed views often in resistance to the agendas of the European colonists they were confronted with. Red Ink is an engaging retelling of American colonial history, one that draws on documents that have received scant critical and scholarly attention to offer an important new interpretation grounded in indigenous contexts and perspectives. ... In a compelling narrative arc, Lopenzina enables the reader to travel through a history that, however familiar, has never been fully appreciated or understood from a Native-centered perspective. [Amazon.com]
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Hairspray
2011Dana Heller
By reconsidering assumptions about mainstream popular culture and its revolutionary possibilities, author Dana Heller reveals that John Waters' popular 1988 film "Hairspray" is the director's most subversive movie. Represents the first scholarly work on any of film director John Waters' films Incorporates original interview material with the director Reveals meanings embedded in the film's narrative treatment of racial and sexual politics. [Amazon.com]
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Mercy Otis Warren: Selected Letters
2009Mercy Warren Otis, Jeffery H. Richards (Editor), and Sharon M. Harris (Editor)
This volume gathers more than one hundred letters-most of them previously unpublished-written by Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814). Warren, whose works include a three-volume history of the American Revolution as well as plays and poems, was a major literary figure of her era and one of the most important American women writers of the eighteenth century. Her correspondents included Martha and George Washington, Abigail and John Adams, and Catharine Macaulay… [From Amazon.com]
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Migration, Accommodation and Language Change: Language at the Intersection of Regional and Ethnic Identity
2008Bridget L. Anderson
This work marries qualitative ethnographic methods to quantitative acoustic methods. The analysis describes how internal and external factors in phonological change differ and demonstrates how these two forces interact to structure the phonological systems of Appalachian and African American Southern Migrant speakers in the Detroit, Michigan area. [Amazon.com]
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Once Upon a Time: Myth, Fairy Tales and Legends in Margaret Atwood's Writings
2008Sarah A. Appleton (Editor)
While it is often acknowledged that Margaret Atwood's novels are rife with allusions from the oral tradition of myth, legends, fables, and fairy tales, the implications of her liberal usage bear study. The essays in this volume have been written by some of the most influential Margaret Atwood scholars internationally, each exploring Atwoodâs use of primal, indeed archetypal, narratives to illuminate her fiction and poetry. These essays interact with all types of such narratives, from fairy tales and legends, to Greek, Roman, Biblical, and pagan mythologies, to contemporary processes of myth and tale creation. And, as the works in this collection demonstrate, Atwoodâs use of myths and fairy tales allows for an abundance of old, yet fresh material for contemporary readers. By reconciling, yet by also revisioning, the archetypal motifs, characters, and narratives, Atwoodâs writings present a familiar, yet unique, reading experience. [From Amazon.com]
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Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible
2008Imtiaz H. Habib
Containing an urgently needed archival database of historical evidence, this volume includes both a consolidated presentation of the documentary records of black people in Tudor and Stuart England, and an interpretive narrative that confirms and significantly extends the insights of current theoretical excursus on race in early modern England. Here for the first time Imtiaz Habib collects the scattered references to black people-whether from Africa, India or America-in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and arranges them into a systematic, chronological descriptive index. He offers an extended historical and theoretical interpretation of the records in six chapters, which serve as an introductory guide to the index even as they articulate a specific argument about the meaning of the records. Both the archival information and interpretive scholarship provide a strong framework from which future historical debates on race in early modern England can proceed. [Amazon.com]
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On Their Own: Women Journalists and the American Experience in Vietnam
2008Joyce Hoffmann
Over three hundred women, both print and broadcast journalists, were accredited to chronicle America’s activities in Vietnam. Many of those women won esteemed prizes for their reporting, including the Pulitzer, the Overseas Press Club Award, the George Polk Award, the National Book Award, and the Bancroft Prize for History. Tragically, several lost their lives covering the war, while others were wounded or taken prisoner. In this gripping narrative, veteran journalist Joyce Hoffmann tells the important yet largely unknown story of a central group of these female journalists, including Dickey Chapelle, Gloria Emerson, Kate Webb, and others. Each has a unique and deeply compelling tale to tell, and vivid portraits of their personal lives and professional triumphs are woven into the controversial details of America’s twenty-year entanglement in Southeast Asia. [Amazon.com]
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Writing Across Distances and Disciplines: Research and Pedagogy in Distributed Learning
2008Joyce Magnotto Neff and Carl Whithaus
Writing Across Distances and Disciplines addresses questions that cross borders between onsite, hybrid, and distributed learning environments, between higher education and the workplace, and between distance education and composition pedagogy. This groundbreaking volume raises critical issues, clarifies key terms, reviews history and theory, analyzes current research, reconsiders pedagogy, explores specific applications of WAC and WID in distributed environments, and considers what business and education might teach one another about writing and learning. Exploring the intersection of writing across the curriculum, composition studies, and distance learning, it provides an in-depth look at issues of importance to students, faculty, and administrators regarding the technological future of writing and learning in higher education. [From Amazon.com]
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Jack Sheppard
2007William Harrison Ainsworth, Edward H. Jacobs (Editor), and Manuela Mourão (Editor)
In London Labour and the London Poor (1861) Henry Mayhew wrote, “Of all books, perhaps none has ever had so baneful effect upon the young mind, taste, and principles” as Jack Sheppard. An historical novel based on the exploits of John Sheppard, a thief who was executed in 1724, Jack Sheppard was blamed for inciting working-class crime and vagrancy for decades after its 1839 publication. ... This Broadview edition includes the original George Cruikshank illustrations, as well as a rich selection of contemporary reviews of the novel and material on the historical Jack Sheppard, Victorian urban street culture, and the novel’s popular theatrical adaptations.
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Makeover Television: Realities Remodelled
2007Dana Heller (Editor)
With the explosion of reality television onto screens and schedules worldwide, this timely and original book explores makeover tv, the ubiquitous reality format that has received little critical attention to date. Top writers and scholars take discussion of reality tv to the next level with lively examination of a wide range of contemporary makeover shows, such as Extreme Makeover, The Swan, Faking It, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and The Apprentice, that ultimately speak to television's own enduring ability to reinvent itself. The book is organized around the overarching argument that contemporary makeover programming provides the paradigmatic example of reality television's far-reaching prominence and mass appeal, an appeal that lies in ""powers of transformation"" or televisual performance that tries not only to capture reality but to intervene in it, with the ultimate aim of remodelling reality. They examine how makeover programming annexes the private space of the home, transforms the body through surgery and rigorous discipline, recreates aspects of social identity and consumer lifestyle, and changes ordinary persons into celebrities and celebrities into ordinary persons. [From Amazon.com]
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The Great American Makeover: Television, History, Nation
2006Dana Heller (Editor)
The Great American Makeover is a collection of essays that explore the American makeover mythos that has been recently repackaged in the form of popular makeover television programs such as Extreme Makeover, The Swan, Supernanny, and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. [Amazon.com]
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The Bowery Boys: Street Corner Radicals and the Politics of Rebellion
2005Peter Adams
In the decades before the Civil War, the miserable living conditions of New York City's lower east side nurtured the gangs of New York. This book tells the story of the Bowery Boys, one gang that emerged as part urban legend and part street fighters for the city's legions of young workers. Poverty and despair led to a gang culture that was easily politicized, especially under the leadership of Mike Walsh who led a distinct faction of the Bowery Boys that engaged in the violent, almost anarchic, politics of the city during the 1840s and 1850s. Amid the toppled ballot boxes and battles for supremacy on the streets, many New Yorkers feared Walsh's gang was at the frontline of a European-style revolution. A radical and immensely popular voice in antebellum New York, Walsh spoke in the unvarnished language of class conflict. Admired by Walt Whitman and feared by Tammany Hall, Walsh was an original, wildly unstable character who directed his aptly named Spartan Band against the economic and political elite of New York City and New England. As a labor organizer, state legislator, and even U.S. Congressman, the leader of the Bowery Boys fought for shorter working hours, the right to strike, free land for settlers on the American frontier, against child labor, and to restore dignity to the city's growing number of industrial workers. [From Amazon.com]
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The Selling of 9/11: How a National Tragedy Became a Commodity
2005Dana Heller (Editor)
The Selling of 9/11 argues that the marketing and commodification of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, reveal the contradictory processes by which consumers in the United States (and around the world) use, communicate, and construct national identity and their sense of national belonging through cultural and symbolic goods. Contributors illuminate these processes and make important connections between myths of nation, practices of mourning, theories of trauma, and the politics of post-9/11 consumer culture. Their essays take critical stock of the role that consumer goods, media and press outlets, commercial advertising, marketers and corporate public relations have played in shaping cultural memory of a national tragedy. [Amazon.com]
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Wedding Song: Memoirs of an Iranian Jewish Woman
2003Farideh Goldin
Farideh Goldin was born to her fifteen-year-old mother in 1953 and into a Jewish community living in an increasingly hostile Islamic state—prerevolutionary Iran. This memoir is Goldin’s passionate and painful account of her childhood in a poor Jewish household and her emigration to the United States in 1975. As she recalls trips to the market and the mikvah, and as she evokes ritual celebrations like weddings, Goldin chronicles her childhood, her extended family, and the lives of the women in her community in Shiraz, a southern Iranian city. Her memoir details her parents’ "courtship" (her father selected her mother from a group of adolescent girls), her mother’s lonely life as a child-bride, and Goldin’s childhood home which was presided over by her paternal grandmother. Goldin’s memoir conveys not just the personal trauma of growing up in a family fraught with discord but also the tragic human costs of religious dogmatism. ... [Amazon.com]
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Outside Shooter: A Memoir
2003Philip Raisor
Philip Raisor was on the losing side in two of the most storied basketball games ever played. He started at guard for the Muncie Central Bearcats, who fell in the 1954 Indiana state final to tiny Milan, the David-over-Goliath event that inspired the movie Hoosiers. On a basketball scholarship to the University of Kansas, he watched his Wilt Chamberlain–led Jayhawks lose the 1957 NCAA championship in triple overtime to North Carolina. In Outside Shooter, Raisor recounts the hard knocks and hard-won triumphs of a basketball odyssey across 1950s America, from Indiana to Kansas to Louisiana, and from adolescence to adulthood... [from Amazon.com]
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Walter Mosley: A Critical Companion
2003Charles E. Wilson
Readers of this Critical Companion will discover the richness of Mosley's writings, as well as his contributions to the African-American literary tradition, the genres of detective writing and science fiction, and American literature in general. Mosley's influences, inspirations, obstacles, and successes are presented in a richly drawn biographical chapter, which incorporates the author's most recent interviews. [Amazon.com]
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Altered Habits: Reconsidering the Nun in Fiction
2002Manuela Mourão
In a comprehensive analysis of the nun in literature, Manuela Mourão challenges the notion that nuns are "women who lead unnatural lives, most probably because they were disappointed in love or because they failed to adjust to 'reality'. Unique in the breadth of its historical and literary scope--the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries and the national literatures of France and England, with references to those of Portugal, Italy, and the U.S. Altered Habits examines the representation of nuns and convents in a range of primary sources, both canonical and more culturally marginal.... [Amazon.com]
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Point of View and Grammar: Structural Patterns of Subjectivity in American English Conversation
2002Joanne Scheibman
This book proposes that subjective expression shapes grammatical and lexical patterning in American English conversation. Analyses of structural and functional properties of English conversational utterances indicate that the most frequent combinations of subject, tense, and verb type are those that are used by speakers to personalize their contributions, not to present unmediated descriptions of the world. These findings are informed by current research and practices in linguistics which argue that the emergence, or conventionalization, of linguistic structure is related to the frequency with which speakers use expressions in discourse. The use of conversational data in grammatical analysis illustrates the local and contingent nature of grammar in use and also raises theoretical questions concerning the coherence of linguistic categories, the viability of maintaining a distinction between semantic and pragmatic meaning in analytical practice, and the structural and social interplay of speaker point of view and participant interaction in discourse. [Amazon.com]
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Gloria Naylor: A Critical Companion
2001Charles E. Wilson
In each of her five novels, Gloria Naylor invites the reader to join her characters in their journeys to move beyond established boundaries and embrace an increasingly diverse society. With lucid analyses of each work, this Critical Companion helps readers comprehend how Naylor successfully links the trials of her African American characters to the struggles of human beings at variance with seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Insights into Naylor's own struggles and successes are provided in a richly drawn biographical chapter, which incorporates fresh materials from a recent interview conducted for this book. Naylor's place within the larger framework of the African American narrative traditions is considered as well. [Amazon.com]
A gallery of books by faculty in the English Department, College of Arts & Letters, Old Dominion University.
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