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FORTHCOMING TITLES
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Listings are as accurate as possible, based upon information available as the catalogue went to press. All new title information is approximate. Actual prices for new titles are set at the time of publication.
Acts of Reading: Interpretation, Reading Practices, and the Idea of the Book in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments
Editors: Thomas 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. The collection draws on history-of-the-book scholarship to make a plea for the centrality of Foxe to any discussion of Renaissance literary history. These essays also productively attend to the relationship between the materiality of books and the conceptual assumptions that govern our engagement with them. The anthology’s focus on digital editions of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs allows it to explore the often conflicted relationship between modern technologies of book production and reception and the early modern texts transmitted via these technologies. More broadly, Acts of Reading explores how books, and our encounters with them through different media, turn us into who we are. Thomas Anderson is an Assistant Professor of English at Mississippi State University. Ryan Netzley is an Assistant Professor of English at Southern Illinois University.
2010 ISBN 978-0-87413-081-2 $58.50
Divine Rhetoric: Essays on the Sermons of Laurence Sterne
Editor: W. G. Gerard
Laurence Sterne, the author of the innovative fictions The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and A Sentimental Journey, served most of his life as a rural Anglican clergyman in Yorkshire, England; for twenty years his sermons were his primary written labors. Sterne published the first two volumes of sermons as the Sermons of Mr. Yorick in 1760 after the initial, widely celebrated volumes of Tristram Shandy and the ensuing controversy revealed their complex paradoxes: they are both sacred and earthy, entertaining and instructional, products of art, duty, and the desire for profit and fame. The dozen essays in Divine Rhetoric, including an extensive critical history, examine the rhetorical and theological contexts of the sermons as well as their possible influences, discerning their intrinsic value to scholars of the fiction of Laurence Sterne and eighteenth-century Anglicanism. The book is accompanied by an audio CD of one of Sterne’s sermons. W. G. Gerard is Associate Professor of English at Auburn University.
December 2009 ISBN 978-0-87413-063-8 $60.00
The End of Domesticity: Alienation from the Family in Dickens, Eliot, and James
Author: 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. Discussing works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James, Hatten shows how these major writers anticipate modernist preoccupations with domestic alienation while responding to their own historical context of changes in, and controversies about, gender roles and the family. Most originally, Hatten argues that these writers’ representations of gender and domesticity are strongly influenced by anxieties about capitalism and the marketplace as well as the changing nature of gender roles in late Victorian England. Charles Hatten is Associate Professor of English at Bellarmine University in Louisville.
November 2009 ISBN 978-0-87413-075-1 $60.00
The Female Homer: An Exploration of Women’s Epic Poetry
Author: Jeremy M. Downes
The Female Homer opens with simple questions: Are there any women’s epic poems? If so, what are the central characteristics of these epics, and how do they relate to the traditional vision of epic poetry as male-authored and masculinist, as powerful and patriarchal? The book 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. Through brief, accessible chapters, the book opens up the mythic structure of women’s epic, developing its relations with feminism and patriarchy, with religion and democracy, with the personal and the political, with its literary grandmothers and its grandfathers. The Female Homer, though aware of the divergences, focuses on bringing together the strong affinities between these diverse epic voices. In doing so, it charts—for the first time—the otherwise invisible tradition of women’s epic. Jeremy M. Downes is Associate Professor of English at Auburn University.
November 2009 ISBN 978-0-87413-076-8 $58.50
The Fiction of Enlightenment: Women of Reason in the French Eighteenth Century
Author: Heidi Bostic
This book argues that women writers of the French eighteenth century claimed reason and contributed to Enlightenment. Eighteenth-century French thinkers in diverse fields repeatedly proclaimed that the light of reason becomes distorted when it passes through the lens of femininity. Women writers challenged this stereotype. Engaging both canonical and non-canonical authors, this study focuses on works by Françoise de Graffigny, Marie Jeanne Riccoboni, and Isabelle de Charrière. It treats texts across genres, ranging from their well-known novels to little-known, unpublished manuscripts. The book examines the fiction of Enlightenment in two senses: first, works of fiction can illuminate Enlightenment; second, current understandings of Enlightenment are fictional to the extent that they overlook women’s works. Faithful to the eighteenth century, this study is also relevant to the twenty-first. It asks: How would current understandings of the French Enlightenment change if women’s intellectual contributions were taken seriously? Heidi Bostic is an Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Gender Studies at Michigan Technological University.
2010 ISBN 978-0-87413-074-4 $53.50
George Herbert’s Pastoral: New Essays on the Poet and Priest of Bemerton
Editor: Christopher Hodgkins
As poet and as country parson, George Herbert engaged the pastoral in all of its varied senses. In October of 2007, many of the world’s leading Herbert scholars met at Sarum College in Salisbury, England to locate Herbert’s pastoral life and writings more particularly in early Stuart Wiltshire. They explored the relations between the pastoral locale of Herbert’s last years (1630-1633) in nearby Bemerton and the themes, images, and tenor of his writing. How did the specific country place, time, and people shape the life and work of this especially lyrical country priest? 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. Christopher Hodgkins is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro.
2010 ISBN 978-0-87413-022-5 $58.50
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