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  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.

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  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.

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  Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women's Films

  Geetha Ramanathan

  Feminist Auteurs examines a rich and diverse body of work that has received insufficient attention both in film studies and in feminist theory on film. Looking at individual films within the context of feminist film as a genre, Ramanathan examines film from diverse cultural traditions, while paying close attention to what might be regarded as feminist in different cultural contexts. The films chosen expand our ideas of feminism covering as they do film from Africa, Latin America, Europe, Asia and the US. Full-length interpretations of twenty-four films, both older and contemporary, including Vagabond, India Song,Bhaji on the Beach, Chocolat, and Daughters of the Dust lay out a complete and powerful framework for reading women’s film.

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  Kathleen Collins: The Black Essai Film

  Geetha Ramanathan

  A philosopher-filmmaker, Kathleen Collins decisively redefined the parameters of African American film with The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980) and Losing Ground (1982). This book uses detailed analyses of Collins’s films to contextualise her work in the African American, feminist and world film traditions, and it highlights her contribution to each of these canons. Exploring the philosophical aspects of Collins’s films and placing her in a genealogy of African American auteurs, Geetha Ramanathan argues that Collins uses film to integrate diverse elements of African American culture, showing how the medium can transform the visual and become a site of convergence for ideas on philosophy, otherness, art, aesthetics and the craft of filmmaking.

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  Locating Gender in Modernism: The Outsider Female

  Geetha Ramanathan

  This book visits modernism within a comparative, gendered, and third-world framework, questioning current scholarly categorisations of modernism and reframing our conception of what constitutes modernist aesthetics. It describes the construction of modernist studies and argues that despite a range of interventions which suggest that philosophical and material articulations with the third world shaped modernism, an emphasis on modernist "universals" persists. Ramanathan argues that women and third-world authors have reshaped received notions of the modern and revised orthodox ideas on the modern aesthetic.

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  Sexual Politics and the Male Playwright: The Portrayal of Women in Ten Contemporary Plays

  Geetha Ramanathan

  Traditional studies of theater have long neglected an overall study of female roles as written by male playwrights. Are the roles blatantly sexist or do they adhere to the cultural norms that even progressive male playwrights cannot ignore? From Georg Buchners Woyzeck to David Hares Plenty, the ten plays studied here have traditionally been seen as extraordinarily innovative and progressive. Despite their seeming openness, each of the plays is affected by the playwrights sexual politics. Laid out is a framework for studying the plays in a feminist context that permits a new reading of the female roles, while still allowing the critic enjoyment of the performance as a whole.

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  Approaches to Select Texts in World Literature

  Geetha Ramanathan and Christian Kwame Awuyah

  This book covers many selections in world literature from the epic, dramatic, prose, novel, and African-American poetry traditions.

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  Monovasia and the Women of Monemvasia

  Yannis Ritsos, Kimon Friar, and Kostas Myrsiades

  Translated from the modern Greek with an introduction by Kimon Friar and Kostas Myrsiades. Monovasia, as is called by the demoticists, and Monemvasia by the purists, is a town and island promontory on the Argolic Bay some four hundred meters from land on the southeastern Peloponnesus. Here Yannis Ritsos was born on May 1, 1909. In this book the poet celebrates the women of his birthplace, young and old, housekeepers and warriors who keep sleepless sentry before their homes and embrace life with courage.

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  Scripture of the Blind: Poems

  Yannis Ritsos, Kimon Friar, and Kostas Myrsiades

  Carefully oberved and simply expressed visions of the human condition.
  Written mostly in a time of war and turmiol, the language is sparse and unflinching in its portrayal of everyday life. Each poem is set within lives discreetly lived in plain veiw of the observer. Yet with each superficial glimpse of the woman next door, or the hunter, or the deaf mute on the bus, the observer contemplates the roots of human perception and motivation and the interaction between the two. "Perhaps in this way he learned the deep secret not even he must reveal."
  Small gestures can have monumental signficance in human interactions. This book will remind everyone who reads it of the poetry all around us: in the people we see on the street; in the passing phrase that takes its context in accidental occurences; in the gesture of a stranger standing far away.
  This poetry reaffirms life in all its shades and colorings. It never forgets death is inevitable, but it reminds us there is a lot of poetry in between.

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  Yannis Ritsos: Selected Poems 1938-1988

  Yannis Ritsos, Kimon Friar, and Kostas Myrsiades

  1991 Outstanding Academic Book of the Year--Choice. "Friar and Mysiades deserve much credit for providing, in one volume, the first full-range sampling of this fecund, variegated, and highly original poet in English."--The New Republic

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  Building a Community, Having a Home: A History of the Conference on College Composition and Communication Asian/Asian American Caucus

  Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Terese Guinsatao Monberg, and Hyoejin Yoon

  Building a Community, Having a Home: A History of the Conference on College Composition and Communication Asian/Asian American Caucus documents how Asian/Asian American teacher-scholars have emerged within and contributed to a number of areas in rhetoric and composition, as well as the National Council of Teachers of English and the Conference on College Composition and Communication in diverse and substantial ways from the 1960s to contemporary times. Contributors reflect on the spaces where the writing of history and the potential for community coalesce, ultimately demonstrating how a history that acknowledges the alliances, unexpected connections and coalitions, gaps, setbacks, and silences is necessary for sustaining a scholarly community that is persistently open to re/vision.

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  Wall Tappings: An International Anthology of Women's Prison Writings, 200 AD to the Present

  Judith A. Scheffler

  Breaking histories of silence and invisibility, Wall Tappings presents an international collection of women's writings, from prisons around the world and across centuries. “These are the marginal texts in a tradition of marginal texts,” writes Judith A. Scheffler in introducing her groundbreaking anthology of writing by women prisoners. Unique in its geographic and historical ranges, this rich collection gives a voice to women whose stories have been long neglected. Speaking from settings as diverse as a Roman prison cell in 203 AD, the labor camps of Siberia in the 1930s, and a Philippines prison in the 1980s, these writers explore the ways in which actual incarceration rests in the shadow of imprisonment within larger society.

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  Scorned Literature: Essays on the History and Criticism of Popular Mass-Produced Fiction in America

  Lydia Cushman Schurman and Deidre Johnson

  Many works now considered classics were scorned by critics when they were first published. While some of these works received little attention when initially released, others were enormously popular. So too, there is a large body of popular American fiction that is only now beginning to receive critical attention. This book examines the growing respect given to American fiction that was scorned by cultural gatekeepers such as librarians and educators, though these works were widely read by the American public. The volume looks at such scorned literature as dime novels, comic books, juvenile fiction, romance novels, and pulp magazines. Expert contributors discuss what these works say about the mores and morals of the people who so avidly read them and the values of those who sought to censor them. The book covers the period from the 1830s to the 1950s and shows how popular literature reflected such concerns as feminism and anti-feminism, notions of the heroic and unheroic, and violence and racism. In doing so, the volume helps fill a gap in scholarship about literature that was clearly important to a large number of readers.

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  The History of the Book in the West: 1700–1800, Volume III

  Eleanor Shevlin

  Influenced by Enlightenment principles and commercial transformations, the history of the book in the eighteenth century witnessed not only the final decades of the hand-press era but also developments and practices that pointed to its future: ‘the foundations of modern copyright; a rapid growth in the publication, circulation, and reading of periodicals; the promotion of niche marketing; alterations to distribution networks; and the emergence of the publisher as a central figure in the book trade, to name a few.’ The pace and extent of these changes varied greatly within the different sociopolitical contexts across the western world. The volume’s twenty–four articles, many of which proffer broader theoretical implications beyond their specific focus, highlight the era’s range of developments. Complementing these articles, the introductory essay provides an overview of the eighteenth–century book and milestones in its history during this period while simultaneously identifying potential directions for new scholarship.

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  Model Voices: Finding a Writing Voice

  Jeffrey Sommers

  Jeffrey Sommers is an Associate Professor of English at West Chester University. His interests include composition and rhetoric, writing assessment, professional journal editing, and pedagogy.

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  From Community to College: Reading and Writing Across Diverse Contexts

  Jeffrey Sommers and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson

  Jeffrey Sommers is Associate Professor of English at West Chester University with a Ph.D. from New York University. His research interests & activities include composition and rhetoric, writing assessment, professional journal editing, and pedagogy. Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson is Professor Emerita from Miami University. Difference theory cuts across the three areas of her research interests: Composition and Rhetoric (basic writing, open admissions and disabled students, histories of writing programs); Disability Studies (disability memoir and rhetoric, disability pedagogy); and Women’s Studies (feminist pedagogies and epistemologies).

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  Fleshing Out America: Race, Gender, and the Politics of the Body in American Literature, 1833–1879

  Carolyn Sorisio

  Fleshing Out America explores the representation of the body in the work of seven authors, all of whom were involved with their era's reform movements: Lydia Maria Child, Frances E. W. Harper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, Harriet Jacobs, and Martin R. Delany. For such American writers, who connected the individual body symbolically with the body politic, the new science was fraught with possibility and peril. Covering topics from representation, spectatorship, and essentialism to difference, power, and authority, Carolyn Sorisio places these writers' works in historical context and in relation to contemporary theories of corporeality. She shows how these authors struggled, in diverse and divergent ways, to flesh out America—to define, even defend, the nation's body in a tumultuous period.

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  Benjamin's Spectacles

  Spring Ulmer

  Allusions to the early 20th century intellectual Walter Benjamin appear throughout this book of poetry that explores such diverse topics as history, shadows, and the season of spring. Shifting through perspectives that blur gender lines and chronological boundaries, there is a darker undercurrent running through the poems that adds emotional depth to the lines and makes it all the more striking when the verse returns to spring.

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  The Age of Virtual Reproduction

  Spring Ulmer

  Spring Ulmer's THE AGE OF VIRTUAL REPRODUCTION disrupts and redefines established patterns of seeing as she looks both at and beyond suffering and slaughter for an ethical way to live. Relentlessly in relation and in isolation, Ulmer meditates on moral and emotional anaesthesia--our age of numbing. On the road in Rwanda, investigating executions, meditating on photographs of the past, Ulmer interrogates her own and others' often romantic obsession with what is disappearing and asks how to be in touch with the real and reality--either through the self or through its loss. Looking at work by August Sander, Walter Benjamin, Congolese painter Tshibumba Kanda Matulu, John Berger, Jean Genet, Kenzaburo Oe, and others, she finds, with Benjamin, that there is no cultural document that is not at the same time a record of barbarism. THE AGE OF VIRTUAL REPRODUCTION offers a catalogue (of people, stories, nature, and art) that maintains that more than just surviving, life can be overwhelmingly and beautifully patterned, and thus, critically, recognizable.

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  Roles of Authority: Thespian Biography and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain

  Cheryl L. Wanko

  Celebrity biographies, with their stories of scandal, never fail to titillate. In fact, one would be hard pressed to find record of the best-seller list they didn't punctuate. But delving into professional struggles, private torments, and sexual escapades of performing artists has a long and unexplored history. Eighteenth-century Britain had its own tradition of celebrity biographies and autobiographies. In fact, the genre began in English in 1695, with the story of Matthew Coppinger, a little-known actor who wrote verses, engaged in pretty crime, and ended his life on the gallows. Roles of Authority provides the first comprehensive study of the earliest hundred years of celebrity biography in English, from actor-thief Coppinger to the superstars David Garrick and Sarah Siddons.