College of Arts & Humanities Faculty Books

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Spontaneous Lines: 20th Century American music for Clarinet and Piano

Robert Maggio

Robert Maggio’s Fantasy: Spontaneous Lines is the title track of this album, featuring clarinetist Nathan Williams and pianist Audrey Andrist.
State of the Art: The ABQ at 50

Robert Maggio

The American Brass Quintet, one of the premiere chamber ensembles of our time, premieres Maggio’s A Sense of Space.
The Wishing Tree: Choral Music of Robert Maggio

Robert Maggio

A combination of exciting live and studio recordings of Robert Maggio’s choral works by the Bucks County Choral Society, West Chester University Concert Choir and Chamber Singers of Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges. Compositions on this Album: Aristotle; The Wishing Tree; Jacklight; Rachel and Her Children – Small Hands Relinquish All.
An Exalted House

Paul Maltby

PR man George Burghess, employed to whitewash the name of a firm linked to a fatal factory fire, suffers torments of conscience. Then a friendship with a woman, who squats in the flat above his own, points the way to the redemption he seeks. But Burghess cannot give up a hard-won career in corporate PR and, instead, descends into spiritual ruin. Through its story of a soul in crisis, "An Exalted House" brings into view the warring sides of London: the corporate zone of hostile takeovers and monuments to financial power versus an alternative zone of popular-festive breakouts and squats, presided over by the spirit of William Blake.
Christian Fundamentalism and the Culture of Disenchantment

Paul Maltby

Within the familiar clash of religious conservatism and secular liberalism Paul Maltby finds a deeper discord: an antipathy between Christian fundamentalism and the postmodern culture of disenchantment. Arguing that each camp represents the poles of America's virulent culture wars, he shows how the cultural identity, lifestyle, and political commitments of many Americans match either the fundamentalist profile of one who cleaves to metaphysical and authoritarian beliefs or the postmodern profile of one who is disposed to critical inquiry and radical-democratic values. Maltby offers a critique that operates in both directions. His use of the resources of postmodern theory to contest fundamentalism's doctrinal claims, ultra-right politics, anti-environmentalism, and conservative aesthetics informs his engagement with contemporary fundamentalist painting, spiritual warfare fiction, dominionist attitudes to nature, and a profoundly undemocratic interpretation of Christianity. At the same time, Maltby identifies some of fundamentalism’s legitimate spiritual concerns, assesses the cost of perpetual critique, and exposes the deficit of spiritual meaning that haunts the culture of disenchantment.
Dissident Postmodernists: Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon

Paul Maltby

Critics who hold that postmodernist art is essentially non-adversarial and apolitical, Paul Maltby contends, have ignored the historical context of the postmodern focus on problems of language. In "Dissident Postmodernists", Maltby examines a major current of postmodernist fiction that can be read as a dissident response to developments of late capitalism that have transformed the field of language and communications. Among Maltby's models of dissident postmodernist writings are "Gravity's Rainbow", "The Public Burning", "Snow White" and more recent publications like "Vineland" and "Spanking the Maid". In a series of readings, he examines the ways in which these works respond to the erosion of the public sphere, the elevation of functionalist discourse, the enlargement of the state propaganda network, the corporate management of mass communications, and the diffusion of concept-poor language forms which limit social understanding. Alert to such developments, Maltby argues, dissident postmodernists such as Barthelme, Coover and Pynchon write with politicized perceptions of language and a heightened awareness of language as a medium of social integration.
The Visionary Moment: A Postmodern Critique

Paul Maltby

In The Visionary Moment, Paul Maltby draws on postmodern theory to examine the metaphysics and ideology of the visionary moment, or 'epiphany', in twentieth-century American fiction. Engaging critically with the works of Don DeLillo, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, Flannery O’Connor, Alice Walker, and William Faulkner, Maltby explains show the literary convention of the visionary moment promotes the myth that there is a superior level of knowledge that can redeem or regenerate the individual. He contends that this common-sense assumption is a paradigm that needs to be confronted and critiqued.
The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic

Christopher Merkner

Christopher Merkner is a Shirley Jackson for the contemporary Midwest, where the ties of family and community intersect darkly with suburban American life. In these stories, an enraged village gaslights unsuspecting vacationers and a young man delays a impending confession, fondling the nostrils of his mother’s pet pig. Sharp and uneasy, for these inheritors of tradition, that which binds them most closely—offering stability and identity and comfort—are precisely the qualities that set them back, pull them down, burden, limit, and ruin them.
Mirror on America: Essays and Images from Popular Culture

Joan T. Mims and Elizabeth M. Nollen

Mirror on America meets students where they are right now. Whether they have lived in America all their lives or have only just arrived, they can consider themselves experts in pop culture. After all, they participate in it every day. Brief, current essays and images on topics like hip-hop, our online lives, and, of course, vampires and zombies spark discussion and critical thinking. And because critical thinking should lead to solid writing, the book’s editorial apparatus gives students clear instruction and support for every step of the reading and writing process. Always engaging and always accessible,Mirror on America reflects the interests of students and the instructors who want them to become confident writers.
The Writer's Options: Lessons in Style and Arrangement

Max Morenberg and Jeff Sommers

The Writer's Options encourages readers to investigate their writing “options” through sentence-combining and rearrangement to create more sophisticated, more effective compositions. The text contains ample practice with arranging and rearranging sentences, paragraphs, and essays as a means of strengthening prose and conveying a more effective message.
Approaches to Teaching Homer's Iliad and Odyssey

Kostas Myrsiades

Homer's epics usually appear first in anthologies used for the general literature courses required of most college and high school students throughout the country. His influence extends beyond the confines of English and classics departments into seminars offered in comparative literature, history, philosophy, and the social sciences. This volume in the Approaches to Teaching World Literature series describes how teachers present Homer in the classroom and convey to students the importance of his epics in Western culture.
Others Must Dance for the Lord Dionysus Now: a Poetic Memoir

Kostas Myrsiades

A poetic memoir in which mythic figures ascend from funeral spaces to stroll the village streets and descend again to light their darkened realms, of saints in wooden casings stern above the bedsheets of shuttered homes, of wrinkled men whose vineyards suck their life's wine, of wine-stained easrth and sun-dyed thighs, of returning home and leaving, again and again.
Reading Homer: Film and Text

Kostas Myrsiades

These nine new essays on Homer's epics deal not only with major Homeric themes of time (honor), kleos (fame), geras (rewards), the psychology of Homeric warriors, and the re-evaluation of type scenes, but also with Homer's influence on contemporary film. Following the introduction and an essay which sets the historical background for the epics, four essays are devoted to fresh analysis of key passages and themes while another four turn to a discussion of the film 'Troy' and Homer's influence on two other genres of American cinema.
The Beat Generation: Critical Essays

Kostas Myrsiades

It has been fifty years since the Beats first came upon the literary scene and although the academy’s hostility toward the Beats has not completely abated, it has certainly diminished. Today mainstream publishers are adding many Beat titles to their lists, and students of Beat literature can draw upon a wealth of critical resources that have been published in the last twenty years. The fourteen critical essays gathered in this collection verify that Jack Kerouac is still the undisputed king of the Beats followed by William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. At the same time, however, the Beat movement is shown to be broader and more far reaching than previously thought, encompassing names such as Oscar Zeta Acosta and William Kotzwinkle and even suggesting influences on contemporary German literature in authors like Wolf Wondratschek, Rolf Dieter Brinkman, and Jörg Fauser.
Karagiozis: 3 Classic Plays

Kostas Myrsiades and Linda Myrsiades

From the Greek Karagiozis Folk/Popular Theater are presented in new English translations, 3 classic plays to celebrate 200 years of documented Karagiozis performances in Greece. The 3 plays are: "The hero Katsandonis", "Alexander the Great and the Cursed Snake", and "Karagiozis Baker".
Margins in the Classroom: Teaching Literature

Kostas Myrsiades and Linda Myrsiades

Brings together established scholars and emerging voices from diverse backgrounds to show how politics and theory can and do affect the most pressing problems confronting the contemporary teacher of literature. The essays in this volume go beyond questioning and examining existing practices to suggest fresh approaches to teaching the expanding literary canon within the context of the politics of the educational institution.
Un-Disciplining Literature: Literature, Law, and Culture

Kostas Myrsiades and Linda Myrsiades

This collection offers fresh and challenging essays by scholars in law, English and comparative literature, social and political thought, and communication studies. It explores unique angles of vision that allow us to read legal opinions as well as criminal cases, abortion clinic violence, trial testimony (victim impact statements), legal authority, and legal fictions of personal and national identity (passports). The literature it analyzes ranges from Shakespeare's Richard II and The Merchant of Venice to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, Anthony Trollope's Orley Farm, and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Providing a breadth of material, this collection breaks through disciplinary boundaries as new voices challenge old paradigms, pushing marginalized questions into the center of the literature and law enterprise.
Cultural Representation in Historical Resistance: Complexity and Construction in Greek Guerrilla Theater

Linda Myrsiades and Kostas Myrsiades

Traces the history of Greek resistance theatre which began under Nazi occupation.
Karagiozis: Culture and Comedy in Greek Puppet Theater

Linda S. Myrsiades and Kostas Myrsiades

Karagiozis—a form of comic folk drama employing stock puppet figures—was immensely popular in Greece until recent years, when newer forms of entertainment have virtually eclipsed it. Derived from ancient Byzantine and Greek sources, it takes its name from the principal puppet character, the clever, humpbacked fool-hero Karagiozis, who appears in many guises, surrounded by a cast of folk caricatures from all walks of life.
A Postcolonial Theology of Life: Planetarity East and West

Jea Sophia Oh

We have here nothing less than a theology of life—life in the intensity of its postcolonial ecology, rippling through the creaturely interconnections of our planetary process, yet at the same time grounded in the beautiful local metaphors of an Asian counter-history. Jea Sophia Oh’s luminous book is a must-read for all who care about the global socio-ecology, about process theology, about eco-femnism, about comparative theology—singly and together. —Catherine Keller, author of On the Mystery and Face of the Deep.
Ursa Minor and Other Poems

Takis Papatsonis, Kimon Friar, and Kostas Myrsiades

Modern Greek poetry by Takis Papatsonis. Translated by Kimon Friar and Kostas Myrsiades.
The Transparent Illusion: Image and Ideology in French Text and Film

Rebecca M. Pauly

This unique study interprets forty major French films, their texts and intertexts, analyzing them both as windows on their subject, projections of the imagination, and as frames or mirrors reflecting the cultural contexts that produced them. They are grouped in three major categories, foregrounding their relationship to history, literature or the filmmaking process itself, in ascending order of opacity and modernity. This much needed work offers not only comparative cultural perspectives on French text and film but also a better understanding of the poetics of image and ideology.
Beverly Cleary

Pat Pflieger

Finally an academic tome on one of America's most beloved children's authors. Pflieger discusses and analyzes all of Cleary works as well as giving some biographical material about her. Academic journals, popular press magazines and newspapers about Cleary's novels are all cited in order to provide other people's reviews and analysis of Cleary's works. This book is a must for anyone who has read any of Cleary's novel and would be particularly useful for college students who are thinking of becoming English teachers, librarians or Ph.D. students in children's literature. Unlike many academic writers, Pflieger's writing style is clear and easy to understand which is a nice contrast to all the boring, pedantic academic writings which are often employed when analyzing children's literature.
Letters from Nineteenth-Century American Children to Robert Merry's Museum Magazine

Pat Pflieger

This collection of letters offers an insight into 19th century America viewed through the eyes of children. They wrote about themselves, their families, and their activities. The letters display children's attitudes to major events, public figures, minorities, women's right, and the Civil War.
The Fog's Net

Pat Pflieger

Devora, the weaver, must make a net for the Fog, who promises not to take away her brother, a fisherman, if she complies. When her brother does not return from the sea the next day, Devora realizes that the Fog has not kept its promise, and that it is she who must go and rescue him.