September 20, 2010, English Department Faculty Publish Four New Books 
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Home Bodies: Tactile Experience in Domestic Spaceby James Krasner Excerpt from book cover: In Home Bodies: Tactile Experience in Domestic Space, James Krasner offers an interdisciplinary, humanistic investigation of the sense of touch in our experience of domestic space and identity. Accessing the work of gerontologists, neurologists, veterinarians, psychologists, social geographers, and tactual perception theorists to lay the groundwork for his experiential claims, he also ranges broadly through literary and cultural criticism dealing with the body, habit, and material culture. By demonstrating crucial links between domestic experience and tactile perception, Home Bodies investigates questions of identity, space, and the body. Krasner analyzes representations of tactile experience from a range of canonical literary works and authors, including the Bible, Sophocles, Marilynne Robinson, Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, and Sylvia Plath, as well as a series of popular contemporary texts. |
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Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination: Yeats, Cavafy, Walcottby Martin McKinsey From publisher’s catalogue: This book follows the careers of three major poets of the European and North American periphery as they engage one of the master tropes of Western civilization. As colonial subjects, they inherited an Anglicized version of Hellenism whose borders might easily have excluded them as civilizational ‘‘others.’’ The book describes the diverse strategies they used—from Bloomian kenosis to Afro-Caribbean ‘‘signifyin(g)’’—to make Hellenism their own. Their use of Greek material, the book argues, is closely tied to their need as members of colonial minorities—Irish Protestant, Greek-Egyptian, and ‘‘part-white and Methodist’’—to define themselves against mainstream metropolitan culture on the one hand, and nationalist constructions of the post-colonial homeland on the other. Their Hellenisms participate in the dialectic of local and global, as the poets at once indigenize the Universal Greek, and re-deploy him to hybridize national culture. The result is a triangulated dynamic that challenges established notions of the postcolonial. Among works discussed are Tennyson’s ‘‘Ulysses,’’ Yeats’s ‘‘No Second Troy,’’ C.P. Cavafy’s ‘‘Waiting for the Barbarians,’’ and Walcott’s Omeros. |
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Swift, the Book, and the Irish Financial Revolution: Satire and Sovereignty in Colonial Irelandby Sean Moore Excerpt from book cover: Renowned as one of the most brilliant satirists ever, Jonathan Swift has long fascinated Hibernophiles beyond the shores of the Emerald Isle. Sean Moore's examination of Swift's writings and the economics behind the distribution of his work elucidates the humorist's crucial role in developing a renewed sense of nationalism among the Irish during the eighteenth century. Taking Swift's Irish satires, such as A Modest Proposal and the Drapier's Letters, as examples of anticolonial discourse, Moore unpacks the author's carefully considered published words and his deliberate drive to liberate the Dublin publishing industry from England's shadow to argue that the writer was doing nothing less than creating a national print media. He points to the actions of Anglo-Irish colonial subjects at the outset of Britain's financial revolution; inspired by Swift's dream of a sovereign Ireland, these men and women harnessed the printing press to disseminate ideas of cultural autonomy and defend the country's economic rights. Doing so, Moore contends, imbued the island with a sense of Irishness that led to a feeling of independence from England and ultimately gave the Irish a surprising degree of financial autonomy. |
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Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)by Michael Ferber Excerpt from book cover: In this Very Short Introduction, Michael Ferber explores Romanticism during the period of its incubation, birth, and growth, covering the years roughly from 1760 to 1860. This is the only introduction to Romanticism that incorporates not only the English but the Continental movements, and not only literature but music, art, religion, and philosophy. Balancing lively details with intriguing topics, it sheds light on such subjects as the "Sensibility" movement, which preceded Romanticism; the rising prestige of the poet as inspired prophet; the suffering and neglect of the poet; the rather different figure of the "poetess"; Romanticism as a religious trend; Romantic philosophy and science; and Romantic responses to the French Revolution, the Orient, gypsies, and the condition of women. Ferber offers a definition and several general propositions about this very diverse movement, as well as a discussion of the word "Romantic" and where it came from. Finally, some two hundred authors or artists are cited or quoted, many at length, including Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Emerson, Hugo, Goethe, Pushkin, Beethoven, Berlioz, Chopin, and Delacroix. |