Featured Title:

Boudica and Her Stories: Narrative Transformations of a Warrior Queen by Carolyn D. Williams ISBN: 978-0-87413-079-9 $65.00    AUP Order Form This book begins with a study of the few ancient texts which provide the source material for all subsequent accounts of the seventh-century British queen Boudica and her ferocious yet ultimately unsuccessful rebellion against the Romans. It shows how their information was assembled over centuries to create the entity we know as Boudica as an individual, including her appearance, personal ties and home life. It follows by discussing their opinions on the atrocities she suffered and committed, their assessment of her fitness for command and chances of victory, and the spiritual, political and national implications of her rebellion, concluding with a brief examination of ways in which writers have invited others to share her story.

The Stonemasons of Creuse in Nineteenth-Century Paris by Casey Harison Casey Harison's work is a welcome and skillful blend of old and new. . . . Covering an era that is in need of a new and detailed history, Harison begins in the late eighteenth century and ends in the early twentieth century. He is able to master this "long nineteenth century study" largely because of his focus on one trade—the stonemasons who migrated to Paris from the Creuse in search of seasonal labor. The centrality of this trade does not mean Harison ignores other trades or concerns; he realizes that his work would be too narrow if its research and sources were not extensive. Yet, he frankly and swiftly poses the same question we might all ask when we first pick up this book, "why the stonemasons?" Harison is generally quite successful in answering this question and the vexing issue of why Paris in the nineteenth century was seen as "the capital of Revolution". . . . The book's conclusion ties together many of the themes first raised in the introduction as well as the creation of "places" of historical memory of the stonemasons' migratory past. Harison summarizes the tensions between people and place as well as between the official desire for laissez-faire economic practice and its apparent inability to foster social order. More at H-France Review.

The Female Homer: An Exploration of Women's Epic Poetry by Jeremy M. Downes The Female Homer explores relations among women's epic poems over a great span—from the ancient Sumerian Descent of Inanna to Rita Dove, from the oral epics of the Russian bylinists to contemporary "language" poets. (more)	The End of Domesticity: Alienation from the Family in Dickens, Eliot, and James by Charles Hatten Few changes in literary history are as dramatic as the replacement of the sentimental image of the home in Victorian fiction by the emphasis in modernist fiction on dysfunctional families and domestic alienation. In The End of Domesticity Charles Hatten offers a provocative theory for this seminal shift that even now shapes literary depictions of the family. (more)	Acts of Reading: Interpretation, Reading Practices, and the Idea of the Book in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments Edited by Thomas P. Anderson and Ryan Netzley Acts of Reading examines how John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments shaped reading and interpretive practice in the early modern period and addresses the impact of recent electronic editions of Foxe’s text on current reading practice and scholarship. (more)

UD PRESS NEWS: Electronic editions of all new titles, starting December 2009, are available through ebrary. Electronic editions of selected titles may also be found through netLibrary, Questia, EBSCO Publishing, and other vendors.

Playful and Serious: Philip Roth as a Comic Writer Edited by Ben Siegel and Jay L. Halio Few contemporary American writers have stirred the minds and emotions of their readers as Philip Roth has done. Even fewer writers have excelled in various forms of the comic as Roth has for over a half-century. Playful and Serious assembles a group of outstanding Roth scholars and critics who focus their attention on the different ways Roth brings his comic tendencies to bear on essentially serious topics. (more)	Searching for God in the Sixties by David R. Williams This paradigm-breaking book by Baby Boomer David R. Williams dares to rethink the whole of the '60s experience, not from a political or sociological but from an historical/theological perspective. The book's chapters each correspond to a line in Emily Dickinson's poem "Finding is the first act." The parallel to Dickinson's experience in the psychic wilderness demonstrates just how much the experience of the '60s was part of an ongoing American story not an aberration. (more)	George Herbert's Pastoral: New Essays on the Poet and Priest of Bemerton Edited by Christopher Hodgkins The fourteen essays in this collection address Herbert's pastoral poetry and practice, cast new light on his actual relations with specific local personalities and places, make fresh connections to the inward biblical and liturgical spaces of his work, consider his outward links to garden and pasture, and discover fictional and theological reverberations beyond Herbert's local, pastoral world. (more)

Web pages maintained by Linda Stein - www2.lib.udel.edu/udpress - Created 1/21/2004 - Last modified 1/29/2010