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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]
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Shakespeare and Race: Postcolonial Praxis in the Early Modern Period
2000Imtiaz Habib
Shakespeare and Race is a provocative new study that reveals a connection between the subject of race in Shakespeare and the advent of early English colonialism. Citing generally neglected archival evidence, Imtiaz Habib argues that a small population of captured Indians and Africans brought to England during the 16th century provided the impetus for Elizabethan constructions of race rather than existing European traditions in which blackness was represented metaphorically. He explores Tudor and Stuart dramatic representations of black characters, focusing specifically on how race affected Shakespeare personally and historically over the course of his career. Using postcolonial paradigms combined with neo-Marxist, feminist, and psychoanalytic insights, Habib discusses the possible existence of a black woman that Shakespeare knew and wrote about in his Sonnets and examines the design of his black male characters, including Aaron, Othello, and Caliban. Shakespeare and Race represents a significant contribution that will fascinate scholars of literature as well as those interested in the cultural impact of colonialism. [Amazon.com]
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Accidental Migrations: An Archaeology of Gothic Discourse
2000Edward Jacobs
This book offers a powerful and new consideration of the nature of the Gothic. It demonstrates how all of the discursive traditions associated with the English word "Gothic" make language interact with migration, collection and display, balance, and rediscovery. Accidental Migrations makes a notable contribution to the theorization and reconsideration of eighteenth-century historiography. [Amazon.com]
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Walking Virginia Beach
1999Katherine Jackson
With 38 miles of coastline, a beachfront boardwalk, three wildlife refuges, and more than 200 parks, Virginia Beach offers plenty to explore on foot. This comprehensive yet compact guidebook will take you to the best the resort has to offer-whether it's history, seafood, or scenic splendor that intrigues you. Walks in nearby Jamestown, Norfolk, Hampton, and Williamsburg are also featured. With Walking Virginia Beach, you can wander among knobby cypress knees or oaks draped with gauzy Spanish moss. Navigate sidewalks through charming neighborhoods, old and new; investigate the lighthouse of Cape Henry; gobble ice cream at the Farmer's Market. Then cap off your day with a soothing stroll along the seashore, bathed in breathtaking colors of sunset. Here are step-by-step directions and detailed maps of 20 excursions, as well as descriptions of landmarks along the way. You're sure to be on the right track with Walking Virginia Beach to guide you.
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Medievalism and the Academy, II: Cultural Studies
1999David D. Metzger (Editor)
Edited book. The impact of cultural studies on contemporary medieval studies is investigated in this latest volume of Studies in Medievalism, which also offers an account of the developing interest of contemporary cultural theorists in the medieval period. Rather than dismissing the connection between medieval studies and cultural criticism as an expression of academic self-interest, the essays identify specific questions which engage both, such as race, history, women, religion, and literature. Topics include the use of Augustine by postcolonial theorists; the influence of studies in medieval mysticism on the development of women's studies programs; and the influence of Foucault and New Historicism on the study of medieval history.
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Medievalism and the Academy, I
1999Leslie J. Workman (Editor), Kathleen Verduin (Editor), and David D. Metzger (Editor)
Edited book. Medievalism, the "continuing process of creating the middle ages", engenders formal medieval studies from a wide variety of popular interests in the middle ages. This volume accordingly explores the common ground between artistic and popular constructions of the middle ages and the study of the middle ages within the academy. Essays treat the genesis of medieval studies in early modern antiquarianism; the erection of academic medievalism through persistent, indeed perverse, appeals to heroic medieval manliness and attenuated female spirituality; the current jeopardy of the book (a medieval invention) in the face of technological assault; the politics of the nineteenth-century academy (F.W. Furnival and others); the editorial practice of Sidney Lanier; and the cultural canonization of Chaucer. [Amazon.com]
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Tuned and Under Tension: The Recent Poetry of W. D. Snodgrass
1998Philip Raisor (Editor)
The essays in this book constitute a close reading of the later poetry of W. D. Snodgrass. Each writer has taken a work or theme that has led to the complexities of Snodgrass's dense layerings of content and technique. These essays also begin to define his relationship to the modern tradition. [Amazon.com]
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Cross-Purposes: Lesbians, Feminists, and the Limits of Alliance
1997Dana Heller (Editor)
A collection of fifteen interdisciplinary essays examining the history, current condition, and evolving shape of lesbian alliances with U.S. feminists. Contributors explore the social and aesthetic significance of the terms "lesbian" and "feminist" with the interest of reforming and strengthening them. [Amazon.com]
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Early American Drama
1997Jefferey H. Richards (Editor)
This unique volume includes eight early dramas that mirror American literary, social, and cultural history: Royall Tylers The Contrast (1789); William Dunlap's Andre (1798); James Nelson Barker's The Indian Princess (1808); Robert Montgomery Bird's The Gladiator (1831); William Henry Smith's The Drunkard (1844); Anna Cora Mowatt's Fashion (1845); George Aiken's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852); and Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon (1859). For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. {Amazon.com]
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Rethinking Language and Gender Research: Theory and Practice
1996Victoria L. Bergvall, Janet Mueller Bing, and Alice F. Freed
Rethinking Language and Gender Research is the first book focusing on language and gender to explicitly challenge the dichotomy of female and male use of language. It represents a turning point in language and gender studies, addressing the political and social consequences of popular beliefs about women's language and men's language and proposing new ways of looking at language and gender. The essays take a fresh approach to the study of subjects such as language and sex and the use of language to produce and maintain power and prestige. Topics explored in this text include sex and the brain; the language of a rape hearing; teenage language; radio talk show exchanges; discourse strategies of African American women; political implications for language and gender studies; the relationship between sex and gender and the construction of identity through language. [Amazon.com]
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Family Plots: The De-Oedipalization of Popular Culture
1995Dana Heller
Family Plots traces the fault lines of the Freudian family romance and holds that the "family plot" is very much alive in post-World War II American culture. It cuts across all genres, insinuating, criticizing, reinforcing, and reinventing itself in all forms of cultural production and consumption. The family romance is everywhere because the family itself is nowhere. [Amazon.com]
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Theodore H. White and Journalism as Illusion
1995Joyce Hoffmann
In this groundbreaking study, Joyce Hoffmann examines a critical twenty-five-year period in the work of one of the most influential journalists of the twentieth century. Theodore H. White was already a celebrated reporter when Jacqueline Kennedy summoned him for an exclusive interview in the aftermath of her husband's assassination. With her help, White would preserve what the First Lady claimed had been John F. Kennedy's vision of the New Frontier as an incarnation of that wistful, romantic kingdom--Camelot. Over the years, friends and advisers to Kennedy declared that they had never heard the president speak of Camelot. But White's article, which ran in Life magazine, created a myth that still endures in the popular consciousness. .... [Amazon.com]
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Mercy Otis Warren
1995Jeffrey H. Richards
Mercy Otis Warren was a descendant of Mayflower Pilgrims, a witness to the American Revolution, a participant in the debates that gave shape to the new nation. She was a patriot and a passionate believer in democracy. She was the mother of five sons, an equal partner in a marriage of 54 years, a loyal and demanding friend. But given the perspective of time, writes Jeffrey Richards in this exhaustive study of her life and complete work, she was above all a writer, one of the most important of her generation. Both political activist and historian, Warren sought through her writing to influence the course of events in her own time and to record them for posterity. Among the first playwrights - and perhaps the first woman playwright - in America, Warren used her plays as a public forum for unabashed promotion of the Revolutionary cause. In such dramas as The Adulateur, The Defeat, and The Group, she skewered Loyalists to the British crown and elevated the self-sacrificing patriot. Not only in her essays and her formidable History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution but even in personal letters did Warren express herself as a historian. Her consistently serious and responsible tone suggests the image of Warren as "Republican Mother", caretaker of the new republic, writing not just to husband or friend or son but to future generations of Americans. Basing his analysis on extensive archival research, Richards corrects many errors of fact in previous Warren scholarship, particularly in her biography and in the attribution of several plays to her authorship. These new findings make this volume valuable to the experienced scholar, while the broad coverage of Warren's work and the provision of literary and historical context make it accessible to students. [From the back cover]
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The Lost Cause of Rhetoric: The Relation of Rhetoric and Geometry in Aristotle and Lacan
1994David Metzger
"As the first postmodern discussion of the relation of rhetoric and time, Metzger’s book examines rhetoric as it is, breaking new ground as a study of Aristotle’s notion of faculty (dunamis), of Lacanian rhetoric, and of the relation of rhetoric and geometry as it does so. It is a book for all theorists (particularly poststructuralist theorists and others eager to know more about Lacan), Lacanians who have ignored Lacan’s relevance to rhetoric, and historians critical of the division, in modern rhetorical studies, between theory and history." [Amazon.com]
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Shakespeare's Pluralistic Concepts of Character: A Study in Dramatic Anamorphism
1993Imtiaz Habib
This book studies the changing dualities and polarities of Shakespearean characterization as a way of examining the playwright's basically pluralistic concept of character and of its function in his art. Illustrated. [Amazon.com]
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Theater Enough: American Culture and the Metaphor of the World Stage, 1607-1789
1991Jeffrey H. Richards
The early settlers in America had a special relationship to the theater. Though largely without a theater of their own, they developed an ideology of theater that expressed their sense of history, as well as their version of life in the New World. Theater Enough provides an innovative analysis of early American culture by examining the rhetorical shaping of the experience of settlement in the new land through the metaphor of theater. The rhetoric, or discourse, of early American theater emerged out of the figures of speech that permeated the colonists’ lives and literary productions. Jeffrey H. Richards examines a variety of texts—histories, diaries, letters, journals, poems, sermons, political tracts, trial transcripts, orations, and plays—and looks at the writings of such authors as John Winthrop and Mercy Otis Warren. Richards places the American usage of theatrum mundi—the world depicted as a stage—in the context of classical and Renaissance traditions, but shows how the trope functions in American rhetoric as a register for religious, political, and historical attitudes.
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Conversations with Nadine Gordimer
1990Nancy Topping Bazin (Ed.) and Marilyn Dallman Seymour (Ed.)
This volume collects three decades of interviews with Nadine Gordimer. In the interviews, she presents her attitudes toward her art and its interconnection with the oppressive, volatile politics in her native land. She has traveled extensively to other countries only to discover that no matter how white her skin she is indeed African and the only country she can call home is South Africa. "If you write honestly about life in South Africa, apartheid damns itself," she says. She is ruthlessly honest, and her fiction has played the vital role of communicating in detail to the rest of the world the effects of apartheid upon the daily lives of the South African people. To maintain her integrity, she writes as though she "were dead," without any thought of how anyone will react to what she has written. She remains heroically undaunted both by the banning of three of her novels by the white government and by the protests of radical blacks who assert that whites cannot write convincingly about blacks. She is concerned neither with the image of blacks nor with the image of whites, only with revealing the complexity, the full truth. This truth condemns the racism upon which apartheid is built. In her nine novels and eight volumes of short stories, Gordimer digs deeper and deeper until she has "thematic layers." These include "betrayal-political, sexual, every form" and "power, the way human beings use power in their relationships." Her accounts in these interviews of how she works and of which writers she admires will fascinate readers, scholars, teachers, and students alike.
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The Feminization of Quest-Romance: Radical Departures
1990Dana Heller
The Feminization of Quest-Romance proposes that a female quest is a revolutionary step in both literary and cultural terms. Indeed, despite the difficulty that women writers face in challenging myths, rituals, psychological theories, and literary conventions deemed universal by a culture that exalts masculine ideals and universalizes male experience, a number of revolutionary texts have come into existence in the second half of the twentieth century by such American women writers as Jean Stafford, Mary McCarthy, Anne Moody, Marilynne Robinson, and Mona Simpson, all of them working to redefine the literary portrayal of American women's quests. They work, in part, by presenting questing female characters who refuse to accept the roles accorded them by restrictive social norms, even if it means sacrificing themselves in the name of rebellion. In later texts, female heroes survive their "lighting out" experiences to explore diverse alternatives to the limiting roles that have circumscribed female development. [Amazon.com]
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First Person Female American: A Selected and Annotated Bibliography of the Autobiographies of American Women Living After 1950
1980Carolyn H. Rhodes (Editor), Mary Louise Briscoe (Editor), and Ernest L. Rhodes (Editor)
An annotated bibliography of autobiographies written by American woman living in the post-1950 era.
A gallery of books by faculty in the English Department, College of Arts & Letters, Old Dominion University.
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