Spotlight
New Books by English Faculty
Department faculty are continually publishing important works of criticism, fiction, poetry, and essays. Below we are featuring some of these publications.
Recent or Forthcoming Books by English Faculty
- Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature
- By Elizabeth S. Anker
- From the publisher:
“In Fictions of Dignity, Elizabeth S. Anker shows how the dual enabling fictions of human dignity and bodily integrity contribute to an anxiety about the body that helps to explain many of the contemporary and historical failures of human rights, revealing why and how lives are excluded from human rights protections along the lines of race, gender, class, disability, and species membership. In the process, Anker examines the vital work performed by a particular kind of narrative imagination in fostering respect for human rights.” - “With deft skill, Elizabeth S. Anker explores some of the most important issues of human rights by moving restlessly between literature and law. The originality of her reading lies in going beyond textual and linguistic codifications and confronting the dignity of the human person in its most urgent, embodied form. I have greatly enjoyed Anker’s phenomenology of the fictions of dignity.” —Homi K. Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University
- Familiar
- By J. Robert Lennon
- From the publisher:
“Familiar is as tightly wound as a great Alfred Hitchcock movie. He keeps Familiar balanced at a perfect pitch between allowing us to believe what has happened to Elisa is real and to think that she's had a mental breakdown brought about by anxiety and depression. In the scientific shadows, Lennon has executed a literary puzzle, a marvelous trick of the mind.” —Los Angeles Times - “[A] stealthy and thought-provoking literary thriller...Lennon succeeds by setting his odd, uncommon narrative in intimate terms that delve into Elisa’s sense of confusion.” —Publishers Weekly
- “[An] allusive and mysterious novel...one of his finest.” —The New York Times Book Review
- The Cambridge Companion to Abraham Lincoln
- Edited by Shirley Samuels
- From the publisher:
“Abraham Lincoln’s stature as an American cultural figure grows from his political legacy. In today’s milieu, the speeches he delivered as the sixteenth president of the United States have become synonymous with American progress, values and exceptionalism. But what makes Lincoln’s language so effective? Highlighting matters of style, affect, nationalism and history in nineteenth-century America, this collection examines the rhetorical power of Lincoln’s prose – from the earliest legal decisions, stump speeches, anecdotes and letters, to the Gettysburg Address and the lingering power of the Second Inaugural Address. Through careful analysis of his correspondence with Civil War generals and his early poetry, the contributors, all literary and cultural critics, give readers a unique look into Lincoln’s private life. Such a collection enables teachers, students, and readers of American history to assess the impact of this extraordinary writer – and rare politician – on the world’s stage. ”
- Answerable Styles: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England
- Edited by Andrew Galloway and Frank Grady
- From the publisher:
“Taking as their touchstone the influential work of Anne Middleton, whose searching explorations of the dialectical intersection of form and history in Middle English writing lie at the heart of the medievalist’s literary critical enterprise, the essays in this volume address the medieval idea of the literary, with special focus on the poetry of Chaucer, Langland, and Gower. The essays, by a notable array of medievalists, range from the “contact zones” between clerical culture and vernacular writing, to manuscript study and its effects on the modalities of “persona” and voicing, to the history of emotion as a basis for new literary ideals, to the reshapings of the genre of tragedy in response to late-medieval visions of history, and finally to the relations between poets writing in different medieval vernaculars. With this unusually broad yet thematically complementary set of essays, Answerable Style offers a set of key critical and historical reference points for questions currently preoccupying literary study.”