In Literate Zeal, Janet Carey Eldred examines the rise of women magazine editors during the mid-twentieth century and reveals their unheralded role in creating a literary aesthetic for the American public. Between the sheets of popular magazines, editors offered belles-lettres to the masses and, in particular, middle-class women. Magazines became a place to find culture, humor, and intellectual affirmation alongside haute couture. Eldred mines a variety of literary archives, notably the correspondence of Katharine Sargeant White of the New Yorker, to provide an insiderÆs view of the publisher-editor-author dynamic. Here, among WhiteÆs letters, memos, and markups, we see the deliberate shaping of literature to create a New Yorker ethos. Through her discrete phrasing, authors are coaxed by White to correct or wholly revise their work. Stories or poems by famous writers are rejected for being \u201cdizzying\u201d or \u201ctoo literate.\u201d With a surgeonÆs skill, \u201cdisturbing\u201d issues such as sexuality and race are extracted from manuscripts. Eldred chronicles the work of women (and a few men) editors at the major womenÆs magazines of the day. LadiesÆ Home Journal, Mademoiselle, Vogue, and others enacted an editorial style similar to that of the New Yorker by offering literature, values, and culture to an educated and aspiring middle class. Publishers effectively convinced readers that middlebrow stories (and by association their audience) had much loftier pursuits. And they were right. These publications created and sustained a mass literacy never before seen in American publishing.

In 1757, a sailing ship owned by an affluent Connecticut merchant sailed from New London to the tiny island of Bence in Sierra Leone, West Africa, to take on fresh water and slaves. On board was the owner's son, on a training voyage to learn the trade. The Logbooks explores that voyage, and two others documented by that young man, to unearth new realities of Connecticut's slave trade and question how we could have forgotten this part of our past so completely. When writer Anne Farrow discovered the significance of the logbooks for the Africa and two other ships in 2004, her mother had been recently diagnosed with dementia. As Farrow bore witness to the impact of memory loss on her mother's sense of self, she also began a journey into the world of the logbooks and the Atlantic slave trade, eventually retracing part of the Africa's long-ago voyage to Sierra Leone. As the narrative unfolds in The Logbooks, Farrow explores the idea that if our history is incomplete, then collectively we have forgotten who we are—a loss that is in some ways similar to what her mother experienced. Her meditations are well rounded with references to the work of writers, historians, and psychologists. Forthright, well researched, and warmly recounted, Farrow's writing is that of a novelist's, with an eye for detail. Using a wealth of primary sources, she paints a vivid picture of the eighteenth-century Connecticut slavers. The multiple narratives combine in surprising and effective ways to make this an intimate confrontation with the past, and a powerful meditation on how slavery still affects us.

The distinguished poet Harvey Shapiro passed away on January 7, 2013. The poems in this book, many of them previously unpublished and discovered only after his death, are a great gift, and the final confirmation of his extraordinary talent. Edited by Shapiro's literary executor, the poet and critic Norman Finkelstein, these last poems bear an unprecedented gravitas, and yet they are as supple, jazzy, and edgy as Shapiro's earlier work. All the themes for which he is known are beautifully represented here. There are poems of his experiences in World War II, the erotic life, and of daily moments in Brooklyn and Manhattan, all in search of a worldly wisdom and grace that the poet calls "a momentary glory." As Shapiro tells us, the poem "Is an Egyptian / ship of the dead, / everything required / for life stored / in its hold." The book includes an introduction by the editor. An online reader's companion will be available.

Pretending is a puzzling activity. Why should we waste our time building up representations of an imaginary world when it would be better to acquire more information about the real one? Engaging in games of make believe, however, also means to be faced with new, possible situations, and thus to anticipate what could happen if something were the case, how we or other people could react, what decisions we should make, etc. In a word, pretense games are a kind of gym, a space where children engage in with unusual situations, in order to be ready to face whatever life could present them with. This book aims to offer an account of the architecture of the mind that is required in order to engage in, and understand, pretense paying special attention to the nature of our imaginings, their power to motivate our actions, and the kinds of metarepresentational abilities that are required in order to keep our imaginary representations distinct from the representations of reality. If pretense is a uniquely human ability, understanding it means knowing what it is that makes us so peculiar.

Why have authors from the safe, social welfare state Sweden captivated the minds of the crime fiction readers across the globe? Kerstin Bergman suggests that killer marketing and a widespread curiosità about the “exotic” Nordic welfare states, their waste landscapes and alleged gender equality, has propelled these authors and novels into the international spotlight. Bergman uses this innovative angle to retell the recent history of crime fiction in Sweden, exploring central themes and selecting key authors that have garnered national and international acclaim for their lethal plots. Swedish Crime Fiction: The Making of Nordic Noir contextualizes the explosive recent history of the genre, offering newcomers and aficionados insights into the minds of protagonista and their literary creators. This is the first research-based and exhaustive presentation of Swedish crime fiction and its Nordic “neighbours” to an international audience.

The notion of text is perhaps the most used and discussed within social and human sciences. Nevertheless, it is surprisingly one of the worst defined. Philology and Linguistics, Literary Criticism and Aesthetics, Philosophy of Language, Hermeneutics, Ethnology, Psychoanalysis, Sociology, Semiotics: all these disciplines refer in various ways to the "text", to make of it the basic object of their analysis or to measure the distance they keep from it. So what does "text" mean? What genealogy does this concept have? Why is there “no salvation outside the text”? This book shows why the text should be the formal model to explain all human, social, cultural and historic phenomena and, as a consequence, the product of a double invention: first as a sociocultural configuration, secondly as an analytical reconstruction.

The Murray Edwards Duse Collection is the best record of Eleonora Duse’s literary background. So advanced was her artistic and literary emancipation that she was considered one of the foremost Italian aesthetes. The discovery and reconstruction of The Collection change in many ways the reception of her acting and of her intellectual profile, shedding new light on her art. The Murray Edwards Duse Collection includes several books that Eleonora Duse read: a fundamental resource in understanding the roots of her artistic profile. It could now be said there are two aspects to Duse’s acting. She is first and foremost one of the greatest actress in the history of theatre; but she is also an incomparable intellectual of her time. The Murray Edwards Duse Collection may be considered metaphorically as Duse’s gold, previously considered to be lost for ever.This book has been published with the sustain of the Murray Edwards College.

In the contemporary world, the figure of the migrant, moving across spaces, cultures and languages,has acquired unprecedented centrality. Migrants have transformed the ways of representingand narrating the transnational world in which they live, responding in new fashions to one of the oldest impulses of men and women of every place and time: the impulse to tell stories. By engaging with the notions of diaspora, postcoloniality, nomadism, translation, and exile, Di Maio moves across the Anglophone and Italophone spectra offering a compelling definition of migrant literature at the turn of the millennium.

Winner of the 2015 Phillis Wheatley Book Award (poetry category) This is the final book in the Plum Flower Trilogy by Afaa Michael Weaver, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. The two earlier books, The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985 to 2005 and The Government of Nature, reveal similar themes that address the author's personal experience with childhood abuse through the context of Daoist renderings of nature as a metaphor for the human body, with an eye to recovery and forgiveness in a very eclectic spiritual life. City of Eternal Spring chronicles Weaver's travels abroad in Taiwan and China, as well as showing the limits of cultural influence.

The Dottery is a tale of dotters before they are born. In this series of prose poems you meet their would-be-mutters, the buoys they will know, their inner warden, and the mutterers who cannot have them. The Dottery itself is a sort-of pre-purgatory, a finishing school for the fetal feminine. The five sections correspond to the conceptual set-ups interrogated within. In “wound,” The Dottery is described, as are its inhabitants and their difficulties. In “Dual,” a gender binary is introduced and (hopefully) eviscerated. “Triage” establishes the issues that plague both the dotters and those who would bring them out into the world—specifically into the idea of America (I’m Erica and I can prefer a hummer to the rose parade”). In “Fear,” failed dotters (out in the world) are described in obit fashion. Finally, in “Thief” one mutterer recounts how she stole her dotter (“a snatched piece”) to become a mutter and chronicles both her desires and regrets.

Winner of the 2013 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize Best Bones is a house. When you walk around the rooms of the house, you overhear the desires and griefs of a family, as well as the unresolved concerns of lingering ghosts. The various voices in the house struggle against the family roles and social identities that they must wear like heavy garments—mother, father, wife, husband, sister, brother, servant, and master. All these voices crave unification; they want to join themselves into one whole sentient being, into “a mansion steering itself.” The poems in Best Bones also explore the experience of living in a physical body, and how the natural world intersects with manmade landscapes and technologies. In it, mother has a reset button, servants blend into the furniture, and a doctor patiently oversees the pregnancy of the earth. In these poems, the body is a working machine, a repository of childhood myth and archetype, and a window to the spiritual world. The poems strive to be visceral on the level of dream, or of a story that is half remembered and half fabricated.

This book investigates the cognitive roots of pronunciation in children and adults and the emergence of accent with adults when learning a second language (L2). Subsequently, any teaching of L2 pronunciation to adults should be premised on a multisensory and multicognitive approach covering a wide selection of teaching and learning strategies consistent with the cognitive roots.

Peruvian novelist, poet, and anthropologist José María Arguedas (1911–1969) was a highly conflicted figure. As a mestizo, both European and Quechua blood ran through his veins and into his cosmology and writing. Arguedas’s Marxist influences and ethnographic work placed him in direct contact with the subalterns he would champion in his stories. His exposés of the conflicts between Indians and creoles, and workers and elites were severely criticized by his contemporaries, who sought homogeneity in the nation-building project of Peru.In Rethinking Community from Peru, Irina Alexandra Feldman examines the deep political connotations and current relevance of Arguedas’s fiction to the Andean region. Looking principally to his most ambitious and controversial work, All the Bloods, Feldman analyzes Arguedas’s conceptions of community, political subjectivity, sovereignty, juridical norm, popular actions, and revolutionary change. She deconstructs his particular use of language, a mix of Quechua and Spanish, as a vehicle to express the political dualities in the Andes. As Feldman shows, Arguedas’s characters become ideological speakers and the narrator’s voice is often absent, allowing for multiple viewpoints and a powerful realism. Feldman examines Arguedas’s other novels to augment her theorizations, and grounds her analysis in a dialogue with political philosophers Walter Benjamin, Jean-Luc Nancy, Carl Schmitt, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, and Álvaro García-Linera, among others.In the current political climate, Feldman views the promise of Arguedas’s vision in light of Evo Morales’s election and the Bolivian plurality project recognizing indigenous autonomy. She juxtaposes the Bolivian situation with that of Peru, where comparatively limited progress has been made towards constitutional recognition of the indigenous groups. As Feldman demonstrates, the prophetic relevance of Arguedas’s constructs lie in their recognition of the sovereignty of all ethnic groups and their coexistence in the modern democratic nation-state, in a system of heterogeneity through autonomy—not homogeneity through suppression. Tragically for Arguedas, it was a philosophy he could not reconcile with the politics of his day, or from his position within Peruvian society.

Appalachia is no stranger to loss. The region suffers regular ecological devastation wrought by strip mining, fracking, and deforestation as well as personal tragedy brought on by enduring poverty and drug addiction. In Driving with the Dead, Appalachian poet, teacher, and artist Jane Hicks weaves an earnest and impassioned elegy for an imperiled yet doggedly optimistic people and place. Exploring the roles that war, environment, culture, and violence play in Appalachian society, the hard-hitting collection is visceral and unflinchingly honest, mourning a land and people devastated by economic hardship, farm foreclosures, and mountaintop removal.With empathy and a voice of experience, Hicks offers readers a poignant collection of poems that addresses themes of grief and death while also illustrating the beauty, grace, and resilience of the Appalachian people. Invoking personal memories, she explores how the loss of physical landscape has also devastated the region's psychological landscape.Graphic, bold, and heartfelt, Driving with the Dead is an honest and compelling call to arms. Hicks laments the irreplaceable treasures that we have lost but also offers wisdom for healing and reconciliation.

Best-sellers are the books that sell well, are read by large numbers of people, and are widely talked about in the media and among readers. Yet there has been little research on the creation, reception, and cultural and social significance of best-sellers. Recognising that popular narratives play an important role in the lives of millions of readers, this book looks closely at the literature so many people read. As global market phenomena, situated in between the power spheres of producers and consumers, best-sellers also highlight the interdependency of culture, market, and the individual. This volume addresses such diverse questions as the creation of hype, the role and the meaning of the author in the present-day media landscape, changes in the book trade, historical perspectives on best-selling literature, and the relationship between best-sellers and literary research.

As a collection of politically engaged poetry for the 21st century, Nude Descending and Empire develops the lyrical voice of a citizen-poet speaking to the urgency of our contemporary moment, especially its ecological crisis. This is a book that brings all the supposed sensitivity of poetry into contact with the world we actually live in—with all its crises, madness, and modernity—and insists that we feel it all. A reader will recognize many of the urgent political issues of our time, yet will find them re-inhabited and transformed here by the imaginative power of poetry. Our great ecological crisis is cast as the fulfillment of a long history of violence, domination, lies, and alienation—in one word, empire—and the book suggests that a livable future requires that we wholly inhabit our body-heart-mind and discover a new paradigm.