New Books at PEOSTA

Reviewed: TLS 20 July 2018 p. 36 (reference)
Description: This selection is made by Boyd Tonkin, who is uniquely placed to choose these 100 titles. Not only was he Literary Editor of The Independent newspaper but he started the prestigious Independent Foreign Fiction Prize which ran from 1990 until 2015 before becoming part of the Man Booker awards. For each selection he has written a commentary on the plot and theme of the work concerned, as well as writing about the merits of the particular translation(s) into the English language. The works are arranged in date order of publication, and are not ranked in any other way.

Reviewed: Choice (Aug. 2019; vol. 56 no. 12); Essential; recommended for community college libraries.
Description: A favorite childhood book can leave a lasting impression, but as adults we tend to shelve such memories. For fourteen months beginning in June 2013, more than half a million visitors to the New York Public Library viewed an exhibition about the role that children’s books play in world culture and in our lives. After the exhibition closed, attendees clamored for a catalog of it as well as for children’s literature historian Leonard S. Marcus’s insightful, wry commentary about the objects on display. Now with this book, a collaboration between the University of Minnesota’s Kerlan Collection of Children’s Literature and Leonard Marcus, the nostalgia and vision of that exhibit can be experienced anywhere. The story of the origins of children’s literature is a tale with memorable characters and deeds, from Hans Christian Andersen and Lewis Carroll to E. B. White and Madeleine L'Engle, who safeguarded a place for wonder in a world increasingly dominated by mechanistic styles of thought, to artists like Beatrix Potter and Maurice Sendak who devoted their extraordinary talents to revealing to children not only the exhilarating beauty of life but also its bracing intensity. Philosophers like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and educators such as Johann Comenius and John Dewey were path-finding interpreters of the phenomenon of childhood, inspiring major strands of bookmaking and storytelling for the young. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 27 July 2018 p. 31.
Description: This is a book of book lists. Not of the “1,001 Books You MUST Read Be-fore You Die” variety but lists that tell stories. Lists that make you smile, make you wonder, and see titles together in entirely new ways. From Bin Laden's bookshelf to the books most frequently left in hotels, from prisoners’ favorite books to MPs’ most borrowed books, these lists are proof that a person’s bookcase tells you everything you need to know about them, and sometimes more besides. (publ.)

Description: Because important works frequently offer challenging responses to social, historical, and political issues, often it is the very best works that provoke–at least initially–the most hostility or discomfort. This work presents an essay introduction to the topic, four “critical essays,” and ten “critical readings,” each meant to explore controversial and debated texts, as well as more general debates about censorship in both its broad and specific in-stance.

Description: Charles Dickens, a man so representative of his age as to have become considered synonymous with it, demands to be read in con-text. This book illuminates the worlds–social, political, economic and artistic–in which Dickens worked. Dickens’s professional life encompassed work as a novelist, journalist, editor, public reader and passionate advocate of social reform. This volume offers a detailed treatment of Dickens in each of these roles, exploring the central features of Dickens’s age, work and legacy, and uncovering sometimes surprising faces of the man and of the range of Dickens industries. (publ.)

Description: Examines the tremendous change the American Civil War brought to society as reflected in the literature of the time. It delves into the cultural, historical, and literary contexts of the era, looking beyond common conceptions and instead reflecting on the era’s complexities and contradictions. The book profiles key American literature related to the war, both on and off the battlefield, including Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Ambrose Bierce’s “Chickamauga,” Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, the Civil War poems of Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, and Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address.” This book serves to demonstrate how profoundly the actions on the Civil War battlefield shaped American politics, society, and the arts. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 21 Sept. 2018 p. 15
Description: Few today are willing to defend the elitist, sometimes racist, vision of the importance of classics, and it is no longer considered essential education for politicians and professionals. Shouldn’t classics then be obsolete? Far from it. As Neville Morley shows, the ancients are as influential today as they ever have been, and we ignore them at our peril. Not only do they have much to teach us about the past, but they can offer important lessons for the complex cultural, social and political worlds we inhabit. Classics is the original interdisciplinary subject, offering students a distinctively open, creative and disputatious education. Classics no longer holds all the answers, but it is unusually receptive to new questions.(publ.)

Reviewed: Slightly Foxed v. 60 (winter 2018) p. 19.

Reviewed: Choice (Jan. 2019 vol. 56 no. 5) Top 75 Titles recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Flannery O’Connor is one of the most widely read, discussed, and taught of all American authors. She is immensely popular with students, general readers, and literary critics. Her work, often characterized as “Southern Gothic,” betrays in its focus on morality her devout Roman Catholic faith even as it displays a wicked sense of humor. She has been the subject of numerous articles and books, and indeed an entire journal devoted to her writings has existed for decades. There is not, however, any chronological overview of the history of O’Connor criticism. The present volume fills that very conspicuous gap. (publ.)

Description: Oklahoma drought refugees seeking livelihood in California, rural white Mississippians, and African American migrants making new lives in Chicago all represented the dramatic transitions across the spectrum of American life during the Great Depression. These vastly different groups of Americans still shared common experiences of desperation and poverty during the 1930s. This book focuses on literary works by three Depression-era authors–William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Richard Wright–and supplies dozens of primary source documents that serve to illuminate the harsh realities of life in the 1930s and enable students to better appreciate key pieces in American literature from the Great Depression era. It gives readers historical context for multiple works of American literature about the Great Depression through a wide range of features, including chronologies, essays explaining key events, and primary document excerpts as well as support materials that include activities, lesson plans, discussion questions, topics for further research, and suggested readings. (publ.)

Description: This volume explores the Russia where the great writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81), was born and lived. It focuses not only on the Russia depicted in Dostoevsky’s works, but also on the Russian life that he and his contemporaries experienced: on social practices and historical developments, political and cultural institutions, religious beliefs, ideological trends, artistic conventions and literary genres. Chapters by leading scholars illuminate this broad context, offer insights into Dostoevsky’s reflections on his age, and examine the expression of those reflections in his writing. Each chapter investigates a specific context and suggests how we might understand Dostoevsky in relation to it. Since Russia took so much from Western Europe throughout the imperial period, the volume also locates the Russian experience within the context of Western thought and practices, thereby offering a multidimensional view of the unfolding drama of Russia versus the West in the nineteenth century. (publ.)

Description: Edgar Allan Poe mastered a variety of literary forms over the course of his brief and turbulent career. As a storyteller, Poe defied convention by creating Gothic tales of mystery, horror, and suspense that re-main widely popular today. This collection demonstrates how Poe’s experience of early nineteenth-century American life fueled his iconoclasm and shaped his literary legacy. Rather than provide critical explications of his writings, each essay explores one aspect of Poe’s immediate environment, using pertinent writings including verse, fiction, reviews, and essays to suit. Examining his geographical, social, and literary contexts, as well as those created by the publishing industry and advances in science and technology, the essays paint an unprecedented portrait of Poe's life and times. (publ.)

Description: Edith Wharton was one of America’s most popular and prolific writers, becoming the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921. In a publishing career spanning seven decades, Wharton lived and wrote through a period of tremendous social, cultural, and historical change. Bringing together a team of international scholars, this volume provides the first substantial text dedicated to the various contexts that frame Wharton’s remarkable career. Each essay offers a clearly argued and lucid assessment of Wharton’s work as it relates to seven key areas: life and works, critical receptions, book and publishing history, arts and aesthetics, social designs, time and place, and literary milieu. (publ.)

Description: Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) wrote in 19th century American English and referenced long-vanished cultural contexts. A “private poet,” she created her own vocabulary, and many of her poems have quite specific local and personal connections. Promoting a richer appreciation of Dickinson's work for a modern audience, this book explores unfamiliar aspects of her language and her world. (publ.)

Description: Long untouched by contemporary events, ideas, and environments, Emily Dickinson’s writings have been the subject of intense historical research in recent years. This volume of thirty-three essays by leading scholars offers a comprehensive introduction to the contexts most important for the study of Dickinson’s writings. While providing an overview of their topic, the essays also present groundbreaking research and original arguments, treating the poet’s local environments; literary influences; social, cultural, political, and intellectual contexts; and reception. (publ.)

Description: Ernest Hemingway’s literary career was shaped by the remarkable contexts in which he lived, from the streets of suburban Chicago to the shores of the Caribbean islands, to the battlefields of WWI, Franco’s Spain, and WWII. This volume examines the various geographic, political, social, and literary contexts through which Hemingway crystallized his unmistakable narrative voice. Written by forty-three experts in Hemingway studies, the comprehensive yet concise essays collected here explore how Hemingway is both a product and a critic of his times, touching on his relationship to matters of style, biography, letters, cinema, the arts, music, masculinity, sexuality, the environment, ethnicity and race, legacy, and women. (publ.)

Description: The fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald serves as a compelling and incisive chronicle of the Jazz Age and Depression Era. This collection explores the degree to which Fitzgerald was in tune with, and keenly observant of, the social, historical and cultural contexts of the 1920s and 1930s. Original essays from forty international scholars survey a wide range of critical and biographical scholarship published on Fitzgerald, examining how it has evolved in relation to critical and cultural trends. The essays also reveal the micro-contexts that have particular relevance for Fitzgerald’s work–from the literary traditions of naturalism, realism and high modernism to the emergence of youth culture and prohibition, early twentieth-century fashion, architecture and design, and Hollywood–underscoring the full extent to which Fitzgerald internalized the world around him. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 23 July 2018 p. 191.
Description: On the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein, this fascinating study explores how the real science of her times influenced Mary Shelley’s classic work of science fiction. Mary Shelley grew up surrounded by the era’s prominent scientific thinkers, and conceived Frankenstein in a time of rapid scientific change–including debates on the reanimation of corpses and “the elixir of life.” This engrossing book offers insight into the world of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century science through the prism of Shelley’s seminal novel–the first work of science fiction ever–revealing how the monster was conceived, positing the real-life basis for Victor Frankenstein, and describing in vivid detail the experiments that might have led to the Creature’s birth. It also explores incarnations of the monster since Frankenstein was first published and modern interpretations of the “mad scientist,” while looking ahead to such scientific wonders as permanent bionic limbs and implants. (publ.)

Description: Franz Kafka (1883-1924) lived through one of the most turbulent periods in modern history, witnessing a world war, the dissolution of an empire and the foundation of a new nation state. But the early twentieth century was also a time of social progress and aesthetic experimentation. Kafka’s novels and short stories reflect their author’s keen but critical engagement with the big questions of his time, and yet often Kafka is still cast as a solitary figure with little or no connection to his age. This book aims to redress this perception. In thirty-five short, accessible essays, leading international scholars explore Kafka’s personal and working life, his reception of art and culture, his engagement with political and social is-sues, and his ongoing reception and influence. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ Aug. 2018 p. 114.
Description: Throughout history doctors have felt the need to express themselves in prose and poetry, often on subjects far removed from their medical interests. Renowned surgeon Seymour I. Schwartz felt this same compulsion to write and eventually decided to investigate other authors with a back-ground in medicine. The result is this informative and entertaining compilation of biographical profiles spanning the Middle Ages to the present era. In many cases, literary fame has eclipsed memory of these authors' medical expertise: Most people today talk about Maimonides, Rabelais, Locke, Schiller, Keats, Conan Doyle, and Chekhov because of their literary works, not because they practiced medicine. But the lesser-known individuals are just as interesting in many ways: such people as Cadwallader Colden, the loyalist lieutenant governor of New York during the American Revolution, who wrote the first English history of the Iroquois; Margaret Georgina Todd, author of popular novels in the Victorian era, which promoted the idea of women in medicine; and Rudolph John Chauncey Fisher, who was not only a physician, researcher, and radiologist, but played a role in the Harlem Renaissance as an orator, musician, musical arranger, and literary figure. Schwartz concludes with profiles of contemporary doctors who are also respected authors. (publ.)

Description: This book helps students to better understand key pieces in literature from the Gilded Age and Progressive Era by putting them in the context of history, society, and culture through historical context essays, literary analysis, chronologies, documents, and suggestions for discussion and further research. It provides teachers and students with selections that align with the ELA Common Core Standards and that also offer useful connections for curriculum that integrates American literature and social studies. It covers Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady, and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Readers will be able to appreciate the significance of this period through these canonical and widely taught works of American literature. The book also includes historical context essays, primary document excerpts, and suggested readings. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 22 June 2018 p. 9.
Description: Russia possesses one of the richest and most admired literatures of Europe, reaching back to the eleventh century. This volume provides a comprehensive account of Russian writing from its earliest origins in the monastic works of Kiev up to the present day, still rife with the creative experiments of post-Soviet literary life. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 17 Dec. 2018 p. 130.
Description: A collection of playfully elucidating essays to help reluctant poetry readers become well-versed in verse. Developed from Adam Sol’s popular blog, this book is a collection of 35 short essays that walks readers through an array of contemporary poems. Sol is a dynamic teacher, and in these essays, he has captured the humor and engaging intelligence for which he is known in the classroom. With a breezy style, Sol delivers essays that are perfect for a quick read or to be grouped together as a curriculum. Though it’s not a textbook, the book demonstrates poetry’s range and pleasures through encounters with individual poems that span traditions, techniques, and ambitions. (publ.)

Description: This collection of original, cohesive and concise essays charts the vital contextual backgrounds to Joyce’s life and writing. The volume begins with a chronology of Joyce’s publishing history, an analysis of his various biographies and a study of his many published and unpublished letters. It goes on to examine how his works were received in the main twentieth-century critical and theoretical schools. Most importantly, it places Joyce within multiple Irish, British and European contexts, providing a lively sense of the varied and changing world in which he lived, which formed him, and from which he wrote. The essays collectively show how Joyce was rooted in his times, how he is both a product and a critic of his multiple contexts, and how important he remains to the world of literature, criticism and culture. (publ.)

Description: Covering many aspects of Jane Austen’s life, works and historical context, this collection of essays provides the most complete one volume introduction to her life and times. The generously illustrated collection of concise contributions is arranged alphabetically, and covers topics ranging from biography to portraits, critical responses to translations, agriculture to transport. An essay on the reception of Austen’s work is also included, showing how criticism of Austen has responded to literary movements and fashions. (publ.)

Description: Author Linda De Roche examines the writing of the time to look beyond the common conceptions of the Roaring Twenties and instead reflect on the era’s complexities and contradictions, including how gender and race influenced social mores. The book profiles key American literature of the time, including F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Sinclair Lewis’s Babbit, Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Nella Larsen’s Passing. Filled with essays that offer historical explorations of each work as well as suggested learning activities, chapters also feature study questions, primary source documents, and chronologies. Support materials include activities, lesson plans, discussion questions, topics for further research, and suggested readings. (Publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 24/31 Aug. 2018 p. 38.
Description: Josep Pla is Catalonia’s foremost twentieth-century prose writer. He witnessed and wrote about some of the twentieth-century’s most notable events including the Spanish Civil War and the foundation of the state of Israel. Due to a lack of translations of his work he is only now being dis-covered by the international audience and will soon join the ranks of major realist writers in world literature. Joan Ramon Resina teases out the writ-er’s deep-seated intellectual concerns and challenges the assumption of Pla as an anti-intellectual. He condenses Pla’s forty-seven volumes of work, including travel books, narrative fiction, and history, into eleven thematic units: time, memory, perception, life, religion, metaphysics, utopia, and self-delusion. Resina acutely explores the writer’s authorial gaze and invites the reader to see the world through the eyes of one of the most un-derappreciated observers and writers of the twentieth-century. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Dec 2018 vol. 56 no. 4) Essential; Outstanding Academic Title Award; Recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Delves into the biographies of four key figures–Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman–who lived during an extraordinary period of literary and social experimentation. The publication of Bellamy’s Looking Backward in 1888 opened the floodgates of an unprecedented wave of utopian writing. Morris, the Arts and Crafts pioneer, was a committed socialist whose News from Nowhere envisions a workers’ Arcadia. Carpenter boldly argued that homosexuals constitute a utopian vanguard. Gilman, a women’s rights activist and the author of The Yellow Wallpaper, wrote numerous utopian fictions, including Herland, a visionary tale of an all-female society. These writers, Robertson shows, shared a belief in radical equality, imagining an end to class and gender hierarchies and envisioning new forms of familial and romantic relationships. They held liberal religious beliefs about a universal spirit uniting humanity. They believed in social transformation through nonviolent means and were committed to living a simple life rooted in a restored natural world. And their legacy remains with us today, as Robertson describes in entertaining firsthand accounts of contemporary utopianism, ranging from Occupy Wall Street to a Radical Faerie retreat. (publ.)

Description: Argues that literary analysis can enhance our historical understanding of race and Reconstruction. The standard view that Reconstruction ended with the Compromise of 1877 is a retrospective construction. Works of literature provide the perspective of those who continued to see possibilities for its renewal well past 1877. … Literature’s political allegories allow us to recreate debates rather than view the end of Reconstruction as a foregone conclusion. Because many of the issues raised by Reconstruction remain unresolved, those debates continue into the present. Chapters treat how the racial issues raised by Reconstruction are interwoven with debates over state v. national authority, efforts to combat terrorism (the KKK), the paternalism of welfare, economic expansion, and the question of who should rightly inherit the nation’s past. Thomas examines authors who opposed Reconstruction, authors who supported it, and authors who struggled with mixed feelings. (publ.)
Contents: Introduction: not in plain black and white – 1. Reconciliation and reunion: clasping hands over the bloody chasm – 2. Federalism: thinking nationally, acting locally – 3. The Ku Klux Klan: the necessity of extreme measures – 4. Of mules and men: African American manhood and the paradox of paternalism – 5. Ruiz de Burton and railroads: the westward course of reconstruction – 6. Working with the heritage of the Old South – 7. Inheriting a shadow and a dream.

Description: Lorraine Hansberry, who died in 1965 at age thirty-four, was, by all accounts, a force of nature. She was also one of the most radical, courageous, and prescient artist-intellectuals of the twentieth century–and one of the least understood. Defined largely by her groundbreaking play A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry has been hidden in plain sight for decades. Little of her manifold contributions, her associations, her other writing, or her transgressive nature is known. A prolific and probing artist, she also committed herself passionately to political activism. Hansberry's unflinching dedication to social justice brought her under FBI surveillance in the midst of McCarthyism, when she was barely in her twenties. Looking for Lorraine is the first biography of Hansberry in decades, and it shows her multi-dimensional and miraculous complexity. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYRB 20 Dec. 2018 p. 24; NYT/BR 20 Jan. 2019 p. 17.
Description: The first translation of painter and writer Jozef Czapski’s inspiring lectures on Proust, first delivered in a prison camp in the Soviet Union during World War II. During the Second World War, in the heart of the malevolent Soviet Union, a Polish prisoner of war brought Marcel Proust’s novel À la Recherche du Temps Perdu to life without a single page of text available for reference. Presenting a series of lectures in an attempt to distract his fellow officers from their collective misery, Józef Czapski managed to revive the novel and his experience of reading it purely from memory. It was a clarifying moment for him, a Proustian moment. His talks were given in French, helping to focus the men’s minds and distract their thoughts from their grim surroundings. Calling upon deep reserves of aesthetic knowledge and critical thinking in a variety of languages, Czapski offered aspects of Proust’s story, like Scheherazade, night after night. His lectures are a testament to the survival of memories of both worlds woven together, the fictional Faubourg Saint-Germain and the actual Soviet prison camp. (publ.)
Note:Translation of: Proust contre la decheance: conférences au camp du Gri-azowietz (Montricher[), France: Editions Noir sur Blanc, 1987).

Reviewed: PW 18 June 2018 p. 94; LRB 19 Dec. 2019 p. 21.
Description: When Stoner was published in 1965, the novel sold only a couple of thousand copies before disappearing with hardly a trace. Yet John Williams’s quietly powerful tale of a Midwestern college professor, William Stoner, whose life becomes a parable of solitude and anguish eventually found an admiring audience in America and especially in Europe. The New York Times called Stoner “a perfect novel,” and a host of writers and critics, including Colum McCann, Julian Barnes, Bret Easton Ellis, Ian McEwan, Emma Straub, Ruth Rendell, C. P. Snow, and Irving Howe, praised its artistry. The New Yorker deemed it “a masterly portrait of a truly virtuous and dedicated man.” This book traces the life of Stoner’s author, John Williams. Acclaimed biographer Charles J. Shields follows the whole arc of Williams’s life, which in many ways paralleled that of his titular character, from their shared working-class backgrounds to their undistinguished careers in the halls of academia. (publ.)

Description: This collection of essays covers the geographical, social, cultural and literary contexts of Melville’s life and works, as well as its literary reception. It will enable readers to approach Melville’s writings with fuller insight, and to read and understand them in a way that approximates the way they were read and understood in his time. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 15 July 2018 p. 10; TLS 23 Nov. 2018 p. 7; Choice (Jan. 2019 vol. 56 no. 5); Top 75 Books highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: A look at the glittering, decadent world of turn-of-the-century Paris through the first in-depth study of the three women who inspired the character of the Duchesse de Guermantes, the epitome of high-born glamour, in Marcel Proust's great novel, In Search of Lost Time. Geneviève Halévy Bizet Straus; Laure de Sade, Comtesse Adhéaume de Chevigné; and Elisabeth de Riquet de Caraman-Chimay, Comtesse Greffulhe, were the three superstars of fin-de-siècle Parisian high society who, as Caroline Weber writes, "transformed themselves, and were transformed by those around them, into living legends: paragons of elegance, nobility, and style." All of them were stifled in loveless marriages and, between the 1870s and 1890s, sought freedom and fulfillment by reinventing themselves as icons. Weber offers an intimate look at the illicit passion, secret heartbreak, and fierce, indomitable ambition that lay behind her heroines' exquisite public facades. At their fabled salons, they inspired and championed the creativity of several generations of well-known writers, artists, composers, designers, and journalists who regarded them with boundless fascination and longing. (publ.)

Description: Nearly every aspect of the poet’s career is treated in this new critical volume: his interest in poetics and style; his role as a public figure; his deep fascination with science, psychology, and education; his peculiar and difficult relation to religion; his investments, as thinker and writer, in politics and war; the way he dealt with problems of mental illness that be-set his sister and two of his children; and, finally, the complex geopolitical contexts that inform some of his best poetry. Contributors include a number of influential scholars of Frost, but also such distinguished poets as Paul Muldoon, Dana Gioia, Mark Scott, and Jay Parini. Essays eschew jargon and employ highly readable prose, offering scholars, students, and general readers of Frost a broadly accessible reference and guide. (publ.)

Description: This wide-ranging collection of essays from 37 renowned Beckett scholars reveals how extensively Beckett entered into dialogue with important literary traditions and the realities of his time. Drawing on his major works, as well as on a range of letters and theoretical notebooks, the essays are designed to complement each other, building a broad overview that will allow students and scholars to come away with a better sense of Beckett's life, writings, and legacy. (publ.)

Description: T. S. Eliot’s work demands much from his readers. The more the reader knows about his allusions and range of cultural reference, the more rewarding his poems, essays and plays are. This book is carefully designed to provide an authoritative and coherent examination of those contexts essential to the fullest understanding of his challenging and controversial body of work. It explores a broad range of subjects relating to Eliot’s life and career; key literary, intellectual, social and historical contexts; as well as the critical reception of his oeuvre. Taken together, these chapters sharpen critical appreciation of Eliot’s writings and present a comprehensive, composite portrait of one of the twentieth century’s preeminent men of letters. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Jul. 2019 vol. 56 no. 11); Highly Recommended; Top 75 titles recommended for community college libraries.
Description: The Victorian era was a time of great social, scientific, and cultural change. The literary works of that period reflect that change and help us to better understand the Victorian world. This book examines the historical, political, social, and cultural contexts of several important Victorian literary works: Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë; Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë; A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens; and several poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, including “The Cry of the Children,” “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” “A Curse for a Nation,” and Aurora Leigh. The volume provides historical explanations, literary analyses, and cultural context for each literary work, including primary documents from the nineteenth century. Topics investigated include women’s rights, workers’ rights, education reforms, marriage laws, race relations, inheritance and heredity, and other issues concerning gender, race, and class in the nineteenth century. (publ.)

Description: Woolf scholars have long debated how context–whether historical, cultural, or theoretical–is to be understood in relation to her work, and how her work produces new insights into context. Drawing on an international field of leading and emergent specialists, this collection provides an authoritative resource for contemporary Woolf scholarship that explores the distinct and overlapping dimensions of her writings. Rather than survey existing scholarship, these essays extend Woolf studies in new directions by examining how the author is contextualized today. The collection also highlights connections between Woolf and key cultural, political, and historical issues of the twentieth century such as avant-gardism in music and art, developments in journalism and the publishing industry, political struggles over race, gender, and class, and the bearings of colonial-ism, empire, and war. (publ.)

Description: This book provides a broad and authoritative framework that will help readers to better understand this widely read yet challenging writer. Each essay offers a critical assessment of Faulkner’s work as it relates to such topics as genre, reception, and the significance of place. Although Faulkner dwelt in his native Mississippi throughout his life, his visits to cities like New Orleans, Paris, and Los Angeles profoundly shaped his early career. Inextricable from the dramatic upheavals of the twentieth century, Faulkner’s writing was deeply affected by the Great War, the Great Depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 10 Dec. 2018 p. 46; PW 29 Apr. 2019 p. 80.
Description: Stoner tells the story of William Stoner. Born into a poor Missouri farming family at the end of the nineteenth century, Stoner is sent to the state university to study agronomy. Instead, he falls in love with literature and be-comes a professor. In this achingly beautiful novel, we witness the many disappointments and struggles in Stoner’s life, including his estrangement from his wife and daughter, and the failure of his academic career to pros-per, all set against the dramatic changes of the first half of the twentieth century. First published in 1965, Stoner was not initially a popular success, despite glowing reviews. However, the novel was rediscovered in the early 2000s, and has gone on to become an international bestseller, as well as a celebrated critical favorite, with many considering it the quintessential American novel. (publ.)

Description: The literary works of the First World War are one of the richest sources we have for understanding one of the twentieth century’s most significant conflicts. Not only do many of them have historical merit, but some were critically acclaimed by both contemporaries and subsequent scholars. For example, Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire, one of the earliest novels of the war, won accolades in France and the respect of war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen as well as novelists Erich Maria Remarque and Ernest Hemingway. This book examines these works and those of war poets Rupert Brooke and John McCrae and others, providing context as well as opportunities to explore thematic elements with primary source documents, such as diaries, letters, memoirs, newspaper and journal articles, speeches, and government publications. It is unique in its use of literary and historical sources as mediums by which to both better understand the literature of the war and use literature to better understand the war itself. (publ.)