Studies in Major Literary Authors
About the Book Series
Studies in Major Literary Authors features outstanding scholarship on celebrated and neglected authors of both canonical and lesser-known texts.
Melville's Monumental Imagination
1st Edition
By Ian S. Maloney
January 14, 2014
Melville's Monumental Imagination explores the connection between the contested 19th century American monument tradition and one of the nation's most revered authors, Herman Melville (1819-1891). The book was written to fill a void in recent Melville scholarship. To date, there has not been a ...
No Image There and the Gaze Remains: The Visual in the Work of Jorie Graham
1st Edition
By Catherine Karaguezian
January 14, 2014
To date, no book-length study of the work of poet Jorie Graham has been published. Graham now holds the prestigious Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University; recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize, Graham has established herself as one of the most ...
Worlding Forster: The Passage from Pastoral
1st Edition
By Stuart Christie
October 25, 2013
Focusing on the literary works and career of British novelist E.M. Forster (1879-1970), this book argues that the writer adapted a much older literary form, the pastoral, to the purposes of writing about modern British experience. The publication points out that Forster's pastoral fiction ...
Joyce and the Perverse Ideal
1st Edition
By David Cotter
October 23, 2013
Representations of masochism--both overt and oblique--permeate the work of James Joyce. While a number of criticshave noted this, to date there has been no sustained and focused analysis of this trope in his writings. David Cotter argues that such an examination is key to understanding the meanings...
Whitman's Ecstatic Union: Conversion and Ideology in Leaves of Grass
1st Edition
By Michael Sowder
October 23, 2013
Whitman's Ecstatic Union rereads the first three editions of Leaves of Grass within the context of a nineteenth-century antebellum evangelical culture of conversion. Though Whitman intended to write a new American Bible and "inaugurate a religion," contemporary scholarship has often ignored the ...
A New Matrix for Modernism: A Study of the Lives and Poetry of Charlotte Mew & Anna Wickham
1st Edition
By Nelljean Rice
September 03, 2013
Many studies of poetic modernism focus on the avatars of High Modernism, Eliot, Pound and Yeats, who created a critical coterie based on culture and class. A New Matrix for Modernism introduces a matrilineage for modernism that traces a distinct women's poetic voice from the Bronte sisters ...
Delicate Pursuit: Discretion in Henry James and Edith Wharton
1st Edition
By Jessica Levine
September 03, 2013
Delicate Pursuit explores the way in which Henry James and Edith Wharton treated subject matter that was considered controversial by American publishers at the turn of the century. In their treatment of risque topics, James and Wharton pursued discretion, the key concept of this study, in order to ...
A Singing Contest: Conventions of Sound in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney
1st Edition
By Meg Tyler
August 21, 2013
A formal analysis A Singing Contest comprises close readings of Seamus Heaney's poetry. Tyler argues that in an era of fractured poetry and politics, Seamus Heaney stands out: his impulse is towards unity and regeneration. Her book considers the interplay between different kinds of literary ...
Social Dreaming: Dickens and the Fairy Tale
1st Edition
By Elaine Ostry
August 21, 2013
Dickens was known for his incredible imagination and fiery social protest. In Social Dreaming , Elaine Ostry examines how these two qualities are linked through Dickens's use of the fairy tale, a genre that infuses his work. To many Victorians, the fairy tale was not childish: it promoted the ...
Editing Emily Dickinson: The Production of an Author
1st Edition
By Lena Christensen
July 26, 2013
Editing Emily Dickinson considers the processes through which Dickinson's work has been edited in the twentieth century and how such editorial processes contribute specifically to the production of Emily Dickinson as author. The posthumous editing of her handwritten manuscripts into the ...
Gertrude Stein and the Making of an American Celebrity
1st Edition
By Karen Leick
July 27, 2012
This book is a cultural history of Stein’s rise to fame and the function of literary celebrity in America from 1910 to 1935. By examining not the ways that Stein portrayed the popular in her work, but the ways the popular portrayed her, this study shows that there was an intimate relationship ...
The Politics of Humiliation in the Novels of J.M. Coetzee
1st Edition
By Hania Nashef
July 27, 2012
In this volume, Nashef looks at J.M. Coetzee's concern with universal suffering and the inevitable humiliation of the human being as manifest in his novels. Though several theorists have referred to the theme of human degradation in Coetzee’s work, no detailed study has been made of this area of ...