Browse by Subject: Literature

Please note that while you may order forthcoming books at any time, they will not be available for shipment until shortly before publication date

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Virginia Woolf, the War Without, the War Within: Her Final Diaries and the Diaries She Read

In her third and final volume on Virginia Woolf’s diaries, Barbara Lounsberry reveals new insights about the courageous last years of the modernist writer’s life, from 1929 until Woolf’s suicide in 1941. Woolf turned more to her diary—and to the diaries of others—for support in these years as she engaged in inner artistic wars, including the struggle with her most difficult work, The Waves, and as the threat of fascism in the world outside culminated in World War II.

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The Remarkable Kinship of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Ellen Glasgow

In this book, Ashley Lear examines the relationship between two pioneers of American literature who broke the mold for women writers of their time.

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Sacraments of Memory: Catholicism and Slavery in Contemporary African American Literature

Sacraments of Memory is the first book to focus on Catholic themes and imagery in African American literature. Erin Michael Salius discovers striking elements of the religion in neo-slave narratives written by Toni Morrison, Ernest Gaines, Leon Forrest, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Charles R. Johnson, and Edward P. Jones.

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At Fault: Joyce and the Crisis of the Modern University

At Fault is an exhilarating celebration of risk-taking in the work of James Joyce. Esteemed Joyce scholar and teacher Sebastian Knowles takes on the American university system, arguing that the modernist writer offers the antidote to the risk-averse attitudes that are increasingly constraining institutions of higher education today.     

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Ulysses Unbound: A Reader's Companion to James Joyce's Ulysses, Third Edition

Ideal for readers new to Ulysses and written with a depth of knowledge that scholars have found invaluable, “Ulysses” Unbound is a clear and comprehensive guide to James Joyce’s masterpiece from one of the foremost Dublin-based Joyce experts.

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Furiously Funny: Comic Rage from Ralph Ellison to Chris Rock

A combustible mix of fury and radicalism, pathos and pain, wit and love--Terrence Tucker calls it "comic rage," and he shows how it has been used by African American artists to aggressively critique America's racial divide.

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Resistance Reimagined: Black Women's Critical Thought as Survival

Looking closely at nineteenth-century texts and twentieth-century novels written by African American women about antebellum America, Resistance Reimagined highlights examples of black women’s activism within a society that spoke so much of freedom but granted it so selectively. 

 

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Joyce and the Law

Making the case that legal issues are central to James Joyce’s life and work, international experts in law and literature offer new insights into Joyce’s most important texts. They analyze Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Giacomo Joyce, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake in light of the legal contexts of Joyce’s day.

 

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Machaut's Legacy: The Judgment Poetry Tradition in the Later Middle Ages and Beyond

In a daring rewrite of literary history, this volume argues that the medieval poet and musician Guillaume de Machaut was the major influence in narrative craft during the late Middle Ages and long after.   

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James Joyce's Painful Case

Demonstrating that one story from James Joyce’s Dubliners is not only a turning point in that book but also a microcosm of a wide range of important Joycean influences and preoccupations, Cóilín Owens examines the dense intertextuality of “A Painful Case.”