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  Is It ‘A Marriage of True Minds’? Balanced Reading in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion

  Lynda A. Hall

  Jane Austen often uses reading as a way to develop her characters. For instance, in Persuasion, Captain Benwick‘s melancholic disposition is revealed through his partiality for Romantic poetry, but Anne Elliot’s value for balance is expressed when she recommends moral essays. Other times, and not unfrequently, characters’ reading choice falls on the works of William Shakespeare—such as Hamlet, which Willoughby reads to Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, and the excerpts from Elegant Extracts we learn that Northanger Abbey’s Catherine Morland has memorized.

  Some of Austen’s characters read Shakespeare with seductive intent, but others show their maturity through the critical thinking that comes with balanced reading—understanding nuance and context rather than memorizing “bits and scraps” of published excerpts. Looking carefully at eighteenth century reading practices as well as characters’ reading in Austen’s last two published novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, this chapter aims to determine the value of reading within Austen’s novels.

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  Madness in Fiction: Literary Essays from Poe to Fowles

  Mark Axelrod-Sokolov

  This book examines one work dealing with madness from each of five prominent authors. Including discussion of Fowles, Hamsun, Hesse, Kafka, and Poe, it delineates the specific type of madness the author associates with each text, and explores the reason for that - such as a historical moment, physical pressure (such as starvation), or the author’s or his narrator’s perspective. The project approaches the texts it explores from the perspective of a writer of fiction as well as from the perspective of a critic, and discusses them as unique manifestations of literary madness. It is of particular significance for those interested in the interplay of fiction, literary criticism, and psychology.

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  Theology, Phenomenology, and the Divine in King Lear

  Kent R. Lehnhof

  "In what follows, then, I would like to think through Levinas's ideas on transcendence and ethics in such a way as to map out a new pathway for approaching Shakespeare's great tragedy. As unorthodox as it may sound, I propose to shed light on the darkling religiosity of King Lear by turning-not to the theological doctrines of early modem Christians-but to the postmodern ethics of a twentieth-century Jew."

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  Bohemians: Greenwich Village and The Masses

  Joanna Levin

  "This chapter traces the convergence of 'the revolt against puritanism' and 'the revolt against capitalism' in the 1910s, focusing on the most celebrated American bohemia Greenwich Village - and on The Masses, the Village periodical that provided the most influential expression of the double-edged bohemian revolt. The effort to combine the personal and the political, the artistic and the social helped fuel a host of interconnected movements and alliances within the bohemian milieu, and the bohemians called upon both Marx and Freud in the effort to promote revolutionary change. Often riddled with internal contradictions and susceptible to forces of cultural co-optation and containment, the quest for bohemian liberation in the 1910s inevitably fell short of the Villagers' ambitious, utopian ideals; nevertheless, the bohemians were astute social critics, recognizing that liberation required them to confront interlocking oppressions based on class, gender, nationality, and race. They sought a more inclusive, egalitarian America, and their art and writing - and their legendary exploits, recounted in numerous memoirs continued to inspire later generations of left-leaning artists, writers, and intellectuals."

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  "It's Such a Good Feeling": Self-Esteem, the Growth Mindset, and Creative Writing

  Anna Leahy

  "Ten years ago, I wrote an essay about grading for Can It Really Be Taught? that was actually about self-esteem. I asserted then, as I do now, that 'our common terminology, the prevalent workshop model, and popular notions of creative writing as unteachable, unacademic, or undisciplined lead to self-esteem in a way that other college classes do not.' By that, I meant that the issue of self-esteem is more likely to be evident in the field of creative writing than in other disciplines and to play a discernible role in dynamics and learning in creative writing classrooms, though I now see how my statement might mistakenly be considered a call to use creative writing classes to boost self-esteem or as a criticism of foundational pedagogical approaches in the field of creative writing."

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  The Double Dealers in Bohemian New Orleans

  Joanna Levin

  "This essay focuses on The Double Dealer, the literary journal that the New York Times called 'the heart and backbone of the Quarter.' The offices and pages of the journal provided the stage for bohemian self-fashioning and community building... The lively, engaging, frustrating, and often offensive 'talk talk talk' (in Faulkner's words) that circulated between Double Dealer publications and the extended dialogues of Faulkners roman à clef, his apprentice novel Mosquitoes (1927), reveal the gendered, racial, socioeconomic, regional, national and temporal fault lines at the base of this Southern bohemia."

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  Women and ‘Value’ in Jane Austen’s Novels: Settling, Speculating and Superfluity

  Lynda A. Hall

  Jane Austen’s minor female characters expose the economic and social realties of British women in the long eighteenth century and reflect the conflict between intrinsic and expressed value within the evolving marketplace, where fluctuations and fictions inherent in the economic and moral value structures are exposed. Just as the newly-minted paper money was struggling to express its value, so do Austen’s minor female characters struggle to assert their intrinsic value within a marketplace that expresses their worth as bearers of dowries. Austen’s minor female characters expose the plight of women who settle for transactional marriages, become speculators and predators, or become superfluous women who have left the marriage market and battle for personal significance and existence. These characters illustrate the ambiguity of value within the marriage market economy, exposing women’s limited choices. This book employs a socio-historical framework, considering the rise of a competitive consumer economy juxtaposed with affective individualism.

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  Poetics of Prose: Literary Essays from Lermontov to Calvino

  Mark Axelrod

  This creative yet scholarly book discusses prose's important relationship to close literary analysis, showing how such an approach can be beneficial for readers, scholars, and writers alike. Bringing together a literary history that consists of writers such as Lermontov, Chekhov, Camus, and Calvino, Mark Axelrod masterfully interweaves discussions of structure, context, genre, plot, and other key elements often applied to poetry but seldom applied to various forms of prose in order to offer bold and surprisingly fresh claims about the writer's purpose. By peeling back these layers of technique and style, this book opens up discussions to better understand and appreciate great dramatists, writers, and poets throughout time by returning back to the core elements that originally comprised their writing crafts.

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  A Political Genealogy of Joseph Conrad

  Richard Ruppel

  Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard, especially on the latter’s critique of what he called “the grand narrative,” A Political Genealogy of Joseph Conrad shows how Conrad’s politics were always radically contingent on audience, contemporary events, and, especially, genre. While the political perspective in each of his stories and novels may be more-or-less coherent and consistent, there is no consistency throughout his work. A Political Genealogy of Joseph Conrad is the first book devoted exclusively to Conrad’s politics since the 1960s.

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  Community Colleges and First-Generation Students: Academic Discourse in the Writing Classroom

  Jan Osborn

  Community Colleges and First-Generation Students examines how first-generation students from diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds are initiated into what is known as academic discourse, particularly at the community college. Osborn systematically looks at specific classroom discourses through detailed evidence provided by the diversities represented by the students, and how the students negotiated their identities in terms of the ideological directionality in play.

  The download link above only contains chapter 2 of Dr. Osborn's book, "Identities: A Context of Multiplicity".

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  No Symbols where None Intended: Literary Essays from Laclos to Beckett

  Mark Axelrod

  In Nabokov's Lectures on Literature, he writes: "Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash." The essays in No Symbols Where None Intended: Literary Essays from Laclos to Beckett use Nabokov's stylistic approach to well-known texts (fiction, drama and criticism) as a point of departure. Notions of style and structure link the three prose pieces discussed in the text, (Beckett, Smart, and Turgenev,) to the fiction and drama of Ibsen and Strindberg. Mark Axelrod joins a wide and deep conversation on writers on writing.

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  Theories of Creativity and Creative Writing Pedagogy

  Anna Leahy, Mary Cantrell, and Mary Swander

  The authors examine the history of creative writing, the dominant approaches to creative writing and creative writing pedagogy, and the applications of theories and approaches to classroom teaching.

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  Train : Riding The Rails That Created The Modern World: From The Trans-Siberian To The Southwest Chief

  Tom Zoellner

  A revelatory, entertaining account of the world's most indispensable mode of transportation Tom Zoellner loves trains with a ferocious passion. In his new book he chronicles the innovation and sociological impact of the railway technology that changed the world, and could very well change it again. From the frigid trans-Siberian railroad to the antiquated Indian Railways to the futuristic MagLev trains, Zoellner offers a stirring story of man's relationship with trains. Zoellner examines both the mechanics of the rails and their engines and how they helped societies evolve. Not only do trains transport people and goods in an efficient manner, but they also reduce pollution and dependency upon oil. Zoellner also considers America's culture of ambivalence to mass transit, using the perpetually stalled line between Los Angeles and San Francisco as a case study in bureaucracy and public indifference. Train presents both an entertaining history of railway travel around the world while offering a serious and impassioned case for the future of train travel

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  Upsetting Composition Commonplaces

  Ian Barnard

  In Upsetting Composition Commonplaces, Ian Barnard argues that composition still retains the bulk of instructional practices that were used in the decades before poststructuralist theory discredited them. While acknowledging that some of the foundational insights of poststructuralist theory can be difficult to translate to the classroom, Barnard upends several especially intransigent tenets that continue to influence the teaching of writing and how students are encouraged to understand writing.

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  A Safeway in Arizona: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Tells Us About the Grand Canyon State and Life in America

  Tom Zoellner

  This book is an account of the state of Arizona, seen through the lens of the Tucson shootings. On January 8, 2011, twenty-two-year-old Jared Lee Loughner opened fire at a Tucson meet-and-greet held by U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords. The incident left six people dead and eighteen injured, including Giffords, whom he shot in the head. The author, a fifth generation Arizonan and longtime friend of Giffords's and a field organizer on her Congressional campaign, uses the tragedy as a jumping-off point to expose the fault lines in Arizona's political and socioeconomic landscape that allowed this to happen. He discusses the harmful political rhetoric, the inept state government, the lingering effects of the housing market's boom and bust, the proliferation and accessibility of guns, the lack of established communities, and the hysteria surrounding issues of race and immigration. He offers a revealing portrait of the Southwestern state at a critical moment in history, and as a symbol of the nation's discontents and uncertainties. Ultimately, it is his rallying cry for a saner, more civil way of life.

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  Acting Virtuous: Chastity, Theatricality, and The Tragedie of Mariam

  Kent Lehnhof

  Given the interrelation of female chastity and female theatricality in early modem discourses, it comes as no surprise that both figure importantly in what is believed to be the first original English drama to be written by a woman. As Elizabeth Cary explores a Jewish queen 's sexual purity in The Tragedie of Mariam, she does so by concentrating on questions of performance. Cary's title character explicitly abjures theatricality even as she embraces chastity, creating a fissure in Renaissance discourses on women that threatens to swallow up the antifeminist idea that female chastity is always an act.

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  Colonial Fiction

  Richard Ruppel

  An encyclopedia entry about colonial fiction, defined as "fiction set in what was once the colonial world, the world that European powers colonized in the 'Age of Discovery'… In this fiction, typically, white, male protagonists leave Europe as explorers, adventurers, soldiers, traders, administrators, or, occasionally, exiled criminals to encounter a foreign world of jungles, deserts, illnesses, and, especially, peoples and cultures."

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  Uranium : War, Energy, And The Rock That Shaped The World

  Tom Zoellner

  Uranium is a common element in the earth's crust, and the only naturally occurring mineral with the power to end all life on the planet. After World War II, it reshaped the global order. Marie Curie gave us hope that uranium would be a miracle panacea, but the Manhattan Project gave us reason to believe that civilization would end with apocalypse. Slave labor camps in Africa and Eastern Europe were built around mine shafts, and America would knowingly send more than 600 uranium miners to their graves in the name of national security. Fortunes have been made from this yellow dirt; massive energy grids have been run from it. Fear of it panicked the American people into supporting a questionable war with Iraq and its specter threatens to create another conflict in Iran. Now, some are hoping it can help avoid a global warming catastrophe.

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  A Thought on the Prudishness of Marianne Moore

  Brian Glaser

  Marianne Moore's prudishness is of a particular kind. While Moore was sensitive and averse to sexual innuendo, she was fascinated by animality and pointed out traits both humans and animals shared in that regard. She was "careful to prevent the theme of human sexuality from obscuring glimpses of the larger but less obvious theme of human animality".

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  Homosexuality in the Life and Work of Joseph Conrad: Love Between the Lines

  Richard Ruppel

  This book analyzes the representations of homosexuality in Conrad’s fiction, beginning with Conrad’s life and letters to show that Conrad himself was, at least imaginatively, bisexual. Conrad’s recurrent bouts of neurasthenia, his difficult courtships, late marriage, and frequent expressions of misogyny can all be attributed to the fact that Conrad was emotionally, temperamentally, and, perhaps, even erotically more comfortable with men than women. Subsequent chapters trace Conrad’s fictional representations of homosexuality. Through his analysis, Ruppel reveals that homoeroticism is endemic to the adventure genre and how Conrad’s bachelor-narrators interest in younger men is homoerotic. Conrad scholars and those interested in homosexuality and constructions of masculinity should all be interested in this work.

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  'Intestine War' and 'The Smell of Mortal Change': Troping the Digestive Tract in Milton's Paradise Lost

  Kent Lehnhof

  "Kent Lehnhof's essay 'Intestine War' and 'The Smell of Mortal Change': Troping the Digestive Tract in Milton's Paradise Lost… expands discussions of the nature of sacred space in Milton's epic. For Lehnhof, Milton's rejection of the body reflects a similar rejection of Roman Catholicism, a further example of how the religious controversies that have defined the early-modern period in England have reached their culmination in Milton. Again, the Catholic/Protestant controversy lies very much behind the period's redefinitions of the relationship between the sacred and the profane. In considering the tendency of readers of Milton to note Milton's detachment in his poetry from the body, even in his discussions of Christ, Lehnhof suggests that it has become impossible by the mid-seventeenth century to speak of the relationship between the sacred and the profane outside the context of not only the Catholic/Protestant debate, but also of the Anglican/Puritan debate that had taken its place by the time of the English Civil War. Although some of the terms are the same as we saw in earlier discussions of Donne and Herbert, the emphasis and tenor of these comments have shifted. As Lehnhof illustrates, the description of the physical in Paradise Lost is tied most unpleasantly to the descriptions, actions, smells, and behaviors of Satan and his cohort of fallen angels. This is an unappealing description of the profane that is very much in contrast to Milton's descriptions of heaven and paradise. Milton's depictions suggest a true dichotomy between the sacred and profane, rather than an absorption and transformation of the profane into the sacred that we have seen described in other essays in this collection. But, this difference is only apparent and only seen when the description involves the divine and the hellish. When the description involves Adam and Eve, the world of man in which sacred and profane must inevitably be joined, then the picture begins to look like that in our earlier essays." --Mary A. Papazian, ed.

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  Performing Woman: Female Theatricality in All's Well, That Ends Well

  Kent Lehnhof

  Lehnhof considers the character of Helena, the traveling "Doctor She" of Shakespeare's "All's Well, That Ends Well", in light of the ciarlatani, or female performers in early mountebank medicine shows that traveled Europe peddling cures and folk remedies.

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  An Ordinary Man : An Autobiography

  Paul Rusesabagina and Tom Zoellner

  The life story of Paul Rusesabagina, the man whose heroism inspired the film Hotel Rwanda. As his country was torn apart by violence during the Rwandan genocide of 1994, hotel manager Rusesabagina--the "Oskar Schindler of Africa"--refused to bow to the madness that surrounded him. Confronting killers with a combination of diplomacy, flattery, and deception, he offered shelter to more than 12,000 members of the Tutsi clan and Hutu moderates, while homicidal mobs raged outside. This book explores what the film could not: the inner life of the man who became the most prominent public face of that terrible conflict. Rusesabagina tells his full story--the son of a rural farmer, the child of a mixed marriage, the career path which led him to become the first Rwandan manager of the Belgian-owned hotel--all of which contributed to his heroic actions in the face of horror.

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  The Heartless Stone : A Journey Through The World Of Diamonds, Deceit, And Desire

  Tom Zoellner

  When he proposed to his girlfriend, Tom Zoellner gave what every American man is supposed to give at such a time, a diamond engagement ring. But when the relationship broke apart a few months before the wedding, he was left with a used diamond ring that began to haunt him. Zoellner looked harder at the stone, and the consequent fascination sent him around the world. Across fourteen nations and six continents, the empty mythology of the diamond drew him into a world in which a piece of carbon is made to breathe with the profound intimacies of our own histories.

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  Uncertainty and the 'Sociable Spirit': Raphael's Role in Paradise Lost

  Kent Lehnhof

  Lehnhof considers the role of Raphael in Milton's Paradise Lost. Though he seems be visiting Eden as a "sinless agent" doing the work of God, he makes many mistakes, contradicts himself numerous times, and misunderstands human love. Lehnhof argues that Paradise Lost represents Raphael in a sinister, perhaps even satanic, way, and that the angel may have precipitated the Fall.