2024
(NYU Press)
Camille Owens
In Like Children, Camille Owens argues that the child has been the key figure giving measure and meaning to the human in thought and culture since the early American period. Showing how Americans sharpened the child into a powerful white supremacist weapon, Owens nevertheless troubles the notion that either the child or the human have been figures of unadulterated whiteness or stable boundaries. The recurring fascination of white Americans for Black children to perform as prodigies鈥攅xceptions to the rules of childhood鈥攊ndicates how childhood鈥檚 social and cultural capital was not only bound up in the marking of racial boundaries but also in their crossing.
Like Children recenters the history of American childhood around Black children and rewrites the story of the human through their acts. Camille Owens argues that white men鈥檚 power at the top of humanism鈥檚 order has depended on those at the bottom. It was childhood鈥檚 modern arc鈥攆rom ignorance and dependence to reason and rights鈥攖hat structured white men鈥檚 power in early America: by claiming that Black adults were like children, whites naturalized Black subjection within the American family order. Like Children locates the creative strategies of Black children suspended outside of this order.
Through the stories of Black and disabled children spectacularized as prodigies, Owens tracks enduring white investment in Black children鈥檚 power and value, and a pattern of Black children performing beyond white containment. She reconstructs the extraordinary interventions and inventions of figures such as the early American poet, Phillis Wheatley; the nineteenth-century pianist, Tom Wiggins (Blind Tom); a child known as 鈥淏right鈥� Oscar Moore at the end of the nineteenth century; and the early-twentieth century 鈥淗arlem Prodigy,鈥� Philippa Schuyler; situating each against the racial, gendered, and developmental rubrics by which they were designated prodigious exceptions. At the same time, she excavates prodigy鈥檚 premodern meaning鈥攎onstrous birth鈥攁s it has underwritten and overdetermined Black childhood, while questioning the idea of monstrosity as a human-exclusionary concept.
Like Children displaces frames of exclusion and dehumanization to explain Black children鈥檚 historical and present predicament, revealing the immense cultural significance that Black children have negotiated and what they have done to reshape the Human in their own acts.
"Luminous and thought-provoking, beautifully written and meticulously researched. Through skillfully navigating the historical trajectory of black child prodigies, Owens sheds light on their often-overlooked struggles and illuminates the profound gap between the idealized notion of prodigy and the harsh realities they faced. The depth of the scholarship is breathtaking, making Like Children a compelling work that is poised to make a dramatic intervention." 鈥� Amber Musser, CUNY Graduate Center
(McGill-Queen's University Press)
Ed. Allan Hepburn
Friends are at the centre of novels by everyone from George Eliot to Elena Ferrante. It is nearly impossible to name a work of fiction that is not enriched by the tensions and magnetisms of friendship.
Friendship and the Novel focuses on the affective and narrative possibilities created by friendship in fiction. Friendship enables plots about rivalry, education, compassion, pity, deceit, betrayal, animosity, and breakup. It crosses boundaries of gender, class, nationality, disposition, race, age, and experience. Some novels offer lessons about distinguishing good friends from bad. In a Bildungsroman, friends contribute to the development of the protagonist through example or advice, as if novels were manuals for making and keeping friends. Sometimes sparks fly between friends and friendship swerves into sexual intimacy. Sally Rooney and other contemporary writers take friendship online.
The essays in Friendship and the Novel听illustrate how friendship, in its many forms - short or lifelong, intense or circumstantial - is a central problem and an abiding mystery in fiction as in life, a subject that continues to shape the novel as a literary form and, in turn, its readers.
鈥�Friendship and the Novel is not just a pleasure to read; it is a well-argued and engagingly written book that opens up new insights into a variety of authors. Its cumulative effect is to demonstrate that friendship and the novel is such an important, indeed inevitable, topic that it leaves one surprised such a book did not already exist.鈥� 鈥� J. Russell Perkin, Saint Mary鈥檚 University and author of Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s
Contributors include Robert L. Caserio (Penn State), Maria DiBattista (Princeton), Jay Dickson (Reed), Brian Gingrich (Texas), Jonathan Greenberg (Montclair State), Barry McCrea (Notre Dame), Deborah Epstein Nord (Princeton), Erwin Rosinberg (Emory), Jacqueline Shin (Towson), Lisa Sternlieb (Penn State), and Emily Wittman (Alabama).
2023
(Columbia University Press)
Alexander Manshel
Contemporary fiction has never been less contemporary.听Writing Backwards听documents how the historical novel took over American literature, and how the push to recover lost or overlooked histories has affected writers of color most of all.
Alexander Manshel investigates the most celebrated historical genres鈥攃ontemporary narratives of slavery, the World War II novel, the multigenerational family saga, immigrant fiction, and the novel of recent history鈥攁longside the literary and academic institutions that have elevated them. He examines the work of Toni Morrison, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Colson Whitehead, Julia Alvarez, Leslie Marmon Silko, Michael Chabon, Julie Otsuka, Yaa Gyasi, Ben Lerner, and Tommy Orange in the context of MFA programs, literary prizes, university syllabi, book clubs, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Even as the literary canon has become more diverse, these cultural institutions have celebrated Black, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous novelists almost exclusively for their historical fiction. Writing Backwards听uncovers how the newly inclusive literary canon came to exist, as well as who and what it still excludes.
Writing Backwards听offers us a surprising new history of the contemporary novel that no future critic will be able to ignore. Alexander Manshel鈥檚 book reads like a detective story, but the stakes of the mystery are very high. He explains how, when the literary canon has itself receded for many into a more remote past, history has come flooding back into serious fiction, especially fiction by minoritized writers. In a series of intricate readings, Manshel demonstrates that history is not done with the novel. 鈥� John Guillory, author of Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study
Alexander Manshel's Writing Backwards is essential reading for students and scholars of contemporary American literary studies. His insights into how institutions and market appetites establish "literary" value are provocative and profound. This book has changed how I think about the relationship between history and the critical acclaim accorded American novels. 鈥斕齋tephanie Li, author of Pan-African American Literature: Signifyin(g) Immigrants in the Twenty-First Century
(McGill-Queen's University Press)
Ed. Robert Lecker
Taking its title from a question in his poem 鈥淭in Roof,鈥� Do You Want to Be Happy and Write? reassesses Ondaatje鈥檚 writing and the role of the poet, from his troubled explorations of the self-reflexive artist to his most recent novels. Comprehensive in both approach and coverage, this new collection offers groundbreaking analysis informed by an understanding of Ondaatje鈥檚 entire oeuvre, placing early poetry collections like The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and There鈥檚 a Trick with a Knife I鈥檓 Learning to Do alongside the full range of his novels and his extensive work as a literary editor. The book highlights the transnational, postcolonial, and diasporic issues that have become increasingly apparent in Ondaatje鈥檚 work. Contributors explore key interests that have reappeared and been rethought across his fiction and poetry: the construction of identity; the nature of memory and its relation to family origins and history; the human body as a site of contestation and struggle; the contrast between Eastern and Western values and the Southeast Asian diaspora; the writer鈥檚 responsibility in depictions of war, psychic trauma, and genocide; and an ongoing fascination with the visual and the media of photography and film.
An eclectic celebration of an iconic author, Do You Want to Be Happy and Write? offers an authoritative reference point for scholars and students of literature and reveals new facets of a major author to his readers around the world.
(McGill-Queen's University Press)
Nathalie Cooke and Shelley Boyd
with Alexia Moyer
When writers place food in front of their characters - who after all do not need sustenance - they are asking readers to be alert to the meaning and implication of food choices. As readers begin to listen closely to these cues, they become attuned to increasingly layered stories about why it matters what foods are selected, prepared, served, or shared, and with whom, where, and when.
In Canadian Literary Fare Nathalie Cooke and Shelley Boyd explore food voices in a wide range of Canadian fiction, drama, and poetry, drawing from their formational blog series with Alexia Moyer. Thirteen short vignettes delve into metaphorical taste sensations, telling of how single ingredients such as garlic or ginger, or food items such as butter tarts or bannock, can pack a hefty symbolic punch in literary contexts. A chapter on Canada鈥檚 public markets finds literary food voices sounding a largely positive note, just as Canadian journalists trumpet Canada鈥檚 bountiful and diverse foodways. But in chapters on literary representations of bison and Kraft Dinner, Cooke and Boyd bear witness to narratives of hunger, food scarcity, and social inequality with poignancy and insistence.
Canadian Literary Fare pays heed to food voices in the works of Tomson Highway, Rabindranath Maharaj, Alice Munro, M. NourbeSe Philip, Eden Robinson, Fred Wah, and more, inviting readers to listen for stories of foodways in the literatures of Canada and beyond.
2022
(Manchester University Press)
Ed. Kenneth Borris
Spenser's extraordinary Shepheardes Calender as first printed in 1579 is arguably the seminal book of the Elizabethan literary renaissance. This volume reassesses it as a material text in relation to book history, and provides the first clearly detailed facsimile of the 1579 Calender available as a book. The editor reconsiders the original book's development, production, design, and particular characteristics, and demonstrates both its correlations with diverse precursors in print and its significant departures. Numerous illustrations of archival sources facilitate comparison. By reinvestigating the 1579 Calender's twelve pictures, he shows that Spenser himself probably designed them, that they involve complex symbolism, and that this book's meaning is thus profoundly verbal-visual. An analyzed facsimile is an essential new resource for study of Spenser's Calender, Spenser, Elizabethan print and poetics, and early modern English literary history.
听
(Bloomsbury Publishing)
Fiona Ritchie
Siblings Sarah Siddons (1755鈥�1831) and John Philip Kemble (1757鈥�1823) were the most famous British actors of the late-18th and early-19th centuries. Through their powerful acting and meticulous conceptualisation of Shakespeare's characters and their worlds, they created iconic interpretations of Shakespeare's major roles that live on in our theatrical and cultural memory. This book examines the actors' long careers on the London stage, from Siddons's debut in 1782 to Kemble's retirement in 1817, encompassing Kemble's time as theatre manager, when he sought to foreground their strengths as Shakespearean performers in his productions.
Over the course of more than thirty years, Siddons and Kemble appeared opposite one another in many Shakespeare plays, including听King John,听Henry VIII,听Coriolanus听and听Macbeth. The actors had to negotiate two major Shakespeare scandals: the staging of听Vortigern听鈥� a fake Shakespearean play 鈥� in 1796 and the Old Price Riots of 1809, during which the audience challenged Siddons's and Kemble's perceived attempts to control Shakespeare.
Fiona Ritchie examines the siblings' careers, focusing on their collaborations, as well as placing Siddons's and Kemble's Shakespeare performances in the context of contemporary 18th- and 19th-century drama. The volume not only offers a detailed consideration of London theatre, but also explores the importance of provincial performance to the actors, notably in the case of Hamlet 鈥� a role in which both appeared across Britain and in Ireland.
听
(University of Virginia Press)
Tabitha Sparks
Critics agree in the abstract that "metafiction" refers to any novel that draws attention to its own fictional construction, but metafiction has been largely associated with the postmodern era. In this innovative new book Tabitha Sparks identifies a sustained pattern of metafiction in the Victorian novel that illuminates the art and intentions of its female practitioners.
From the mid-nineteenth century through the fin de si猫cle, novels by Victorian women such as Charlotte Bront毛, Rhoda Broughton, Charlotte Riddell, Eliza Lynn Linton, and several New Women authors share a common but underexamined trope: the fictional characterization of the woman novelist or autobiographer.听Victorian Metafiction听reveals how these novels systemically dispute the assumptions that women wrote primarily about their emotions or were restricted to trivial, sentimental plots.
Countering an established tradition that has read novels by women writers as heavily autobiographical and confessional, Sparks identifies the literary technique of metafiction in numerous novels by women writers and argues that women used metafictional self-consciousness to draw the reader鈥檚 attention to the book and not the novelist. By dislodging the narrative from these cultural prescriptions,听Victorian Metafiction听effectively argues how these women novelists presented the business and art of writing as the subject of the novel and wrote metafiction in order to establish their artistic integrity and professional authority.
2021
(Oxford University Press)
Maggie Kilgour
A defence of the importance of poetry that studies one of the greatest poets of the English tradition: John Milton.
The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading.
Why would anyone read John Milton today? To many, poetry in general is an irrelevant and even irresponsible luxury that we cannot afford in a time of environmental and social crisis. The work of a seventeenth-century 'Puritan' might seem especially obscure and out of touch with our needs. But this book argues that Milton offers us one of the most powerful arguments for the importance of poetry today, both representing in his poetry and demonstrating through his own life, the transformative and sustaining force of the human imagination even in times of greatest upheaval. Writing out of his own experience of loss and disappointment, he insists that poetry is a form of knowledge, a way of seeing and understanding the world around us, others, and indeed ourselves. He uses the resources of poetry鈥攊ts language, imagery, and forms鈥攖o challenge and shake us up, making us think in unfamiliar ways and expanding our imagination and our sense of the possibilities in our lives. Milton insists that poetry gives us knowledge of truths we otherwise would never apprehend; it enriches the experience of both writers and readers and makes us creative and fully realized human beings.
2020
Yael Halevi-Wise
Allan Hepburn and Isabelle Daunais, eds.
Robert Lecker
Eli MacLaren
Richard Jean So
Monica Popescu
Kerry Bystrom, Monica Popescu and Katherine Zien, eds.
Michael Van Dussen
Michael Van Dussen and Pavel Soukup, eds.
2019
Sandeep Banerjee
Lynn Kozak and听Miranda Hickman,听eds.
2018
Allan Hepburn
Peter Sabor
2017
Kenneth Borris
Peter Sabor and Betty A. Schellenberg, eds.
Tabitha Sparks, ed.
Alanna Thain
Katherine Zien
2016
Richard Jean So
Michael van Dussen and听J. Patrick Hornbeck II, eds.
2015
Paul听Yachnin & Marlene Eberhart, eds.
Robert Lecker, ed.
鈥�
Peter Sabor, ed.
Nathalie Cooke & Kathryn Harvey, eds.
Michael Johnston & Michael Van Dussen, eds.
Louise Penner and Tabitha Sparks, eds.
2014
Fiona Ritchie
Paul Edward Yachnin, ed.
2013
Sean Carney
Robert Lecker
Volume 5 - Environment Part I
Minnie Grey, Peter Mittenthal, Marianne Stenbaek eds.
听
Volume 6 - Environment Part II
Minnie Grey, Peter Mittenthal, Marianne Stenbaek eds.
2012
Linda Bree, Peter Sabor & Janet Todd,听eds.
Marianne Stenbaek & Peter Fr. Rosing, eds.
Marianne Stenbaek & Minnie Grey, eds.
A series of anthologies of writings by Nunavik Inuit. In English.
Yael Halevi-Wise
Miranda B. Hickman & John D. McIntyre, eds.
Robert Wisnovsky, Faith Wallis, Jamie Fumo & Carlos Fraenkel,听eds.
Michael Van Dussen
Maggie Kilgour
Michael Groden,听Martin Kreiswirth & Imre Szeman, eds.
Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor, eds.
2011
Marianne A. Stenbaek & Minnie Grey, eds.
A series of anthologies of writings by Nunavik Inuit. In English.
Miranda Hickman
Erin Hurley
Peter Sabor, ed.
Eli MacLaren
Paul Yachnin & Anthony Dawson, eds.
2010
Aqqaluk Lynge; Ken Norris and Marianne Stenbaek, trans.
The poetry of Aqqaluk Lynge, the International Chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council. In English and Greenlandic.
H.C. Petersen; Marianne Stenbaek, ed.
Traditional knowledge on the environment, animals and culture collected by the Greenlander HC Petersen over 60 years.听In English and Greenlandic.
Marianne Stenbaek; Minnie Grey, eds.
A series of anthologies of writings by Nunavik Inuit. In English.
Allan Hepburn
Allan Hepburn
Thomas Heise
Nathalie Cooke, ed.
听
Brian Trehearne, ed.
Erin Hurley
Monica Popescu
Jamie Fumo
2009
Wilfred Grenfell; Marianne Stenbaek, intro.
Tabitha Sparks
听
Derek Nystrom
Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights, eds.
Tom Mole
:
Nathalie Cooke
Paul Yachnin and Bronwen Wilson, eds.
听
Monique Morgan
2008
Ned Schantz
Paul Yachnin and Patricia Badir, eds.
Peter Sabor and Paul Yachnin, eds.
Ken Borris, ed.
2007
Ken Borris
Peter Sabor, ed.
Tom Mole
2006
Peter Sabor, ed.