Archive

New Books Archive Page

To see all the New Books, including the most recent, go to

New Books and Articles: https://ssawwnew.wordpress.com/category/new-books-and-articles/

Rather than individual pages, this link will be used to collect all the New Books notices.

 2014   2013    2012    2011

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The Western Captive and Other Indian Stories

Written by: Elizabeth Oakes Smith
Edited by: Caroline Woidat

This edition recovers Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s successful 1842 novel The Western Captive; or, The Times of Tecumseh with many of Oakes’s Smith’s other writings about Native Americans, including short stories, legends, autobiographical and biographical sketches. The Western Captive is a captivity narrative portraying the Shawnee leader as an American hero and as the white heroine’s spiritual soulmate; in contrast to the later popular legend of Tecumseh’s rejected marriage proposal to a white woman, Margaret, the “captive” of the title, returns Tecumseh’s love and embraces life apart from white society.

The primary texts are accompanied by selections from Oakes Smith’s Woman and Her Needs and from her unpublished autobiography. Other captivity narratives, writings by Oakes Smith’s colleagues Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, and contemporary depictions of the Shawnee people are also included.

https://www.broadviewpress.com/product.php?productid=2133&cat=56&page=7

Teaching Transatlanticism: Resources for Teaching Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Print Culture

Hughes, Linda K., and Sarah R. Robbins, eds.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015.

The 18 chapters in this book outline conceptual approaches to the field and provide practical resources for teaching, ranging from ideas for individual class sessions to full syllabi and curricular frameworks.

The book is divided into 5 key sections: Curricular Histories and Key Trends; Organising Curriculum through Transatlantic Lenses; Teaching Transatlantic Figures; Teaching Genres in Transatlantic Context; and Envisioning Digital Transatlanticism.

http://www.euppublishing.com/book/9780748694457

Performatively Speaking: Speech and Action in Antebellum American Literature

Debra J. Rosenthal

University of Virginia Press

In Performatively Speaking, Debra Rosenthal draws on speech act theory to open up the current critical conversation about antebellum American fiction and culture and to explore what happens when writers use words not just to represent action but to constitute action itself. Examining moments of discursive action in a range of canonical and noncanonical works—T. S. Arthur’s temperance tales, Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick—she shows how words act when writers no longer hold to a difference between writing and doing.. . . Through her comparative methodology and historicist and feminist readings, Rosenthal asks readers to rethink the ways that speech and action intersect.

http://books.upress.virginia.edu/title/4839

Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England 

Abram Van Engen

Oxford University Press

The first history of sympathy in seventeenth century America

Challenges the literary history of sentimentalism

Reveals a Calvinist theology of sympathy and explores its implications for both Puritan and American culture

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/sympathetic-puritans-9780199379637?cc=us&lang=en&

Dancing in Red Shoes Will Kill You

a novel by Donna Decker

Through the braided narratives of three spirited characters, this novel bears witness to the infamous crime that metastasized uber-civilized Montreal, the “Montreal Massacre,” when on December 6, 1989, fourteen female engineering students were murdered in their classrooms.

The novel focuses on the lives of Deirdre, a first-year female engineering student at Aquitaine, who takes a Women’s Studies course as an elective and Marin, a student at Cantech who ponders what it means to be a female engineering student in such a chilly gendered climate. Everyone wants Marin at her party. Bohemian and beautiful, she is as passionate about constructing sets for theater and opera as she is about Trey, the one man she can finally trust.

https://www.inanna.ca/catalog/dancing-red-shoes-will-kill-you/

Emily Dickinson: A User’s Guide

Martha Nell Smith

Wiley Blackwell Introductions to Literature, 2015.

Emily Dickinson, A User’s Guide presents a comprehensive introduction to the life and works of Emily Dickinson, Offers a richly appreciative biographical and critical introduction to America’s most widely admired woman poet.

Miles of Stare: Transcendentalism and the Problem of Literary Vision in 19th-C America

Michelle Kohler
University of Alabama Press

Miles of Stare explores the problem of nineteenth-century American literary vision: the strange conflation of visible reality and poetic language that emerges repeatedly in the metaphors and literary creations of American transcendentalists.

Tracing this metaphorical conflict across genres from the 1830s through the 1880s, Miles of Stare illuminates the divergent, contentious fates of American literary vision as nineteenth-century writers wrestle with the commanding conflation of vision and language that lies at the center of American transcendentalism—and at the core of American national identity.

http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Miles-of-Stare,5848.aspx

The Western Captive and Other Indian Stories

Written by: Elizabeth Oakes Smith; Edited by: Caroline Woidat

Broadview Editions

This edition recovers Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s successful 1842 novel The Western Captive; or, The Times of Tecumseh with many of Oakes’s Smith’s other writings about Native Americans, including short stories, legends, autobiographical and biographical sketches. The Western Captive is a captivity narrative portraying the Shawnee leader as an American hero and as the white heroine’s spiritual soulmate; in contrast to the later popular legend of Tecumseh’s rejected marriage proposal to a white woman, Margaret, the “captive” of the title, returns Tecumseh’s love and embraces life apart from white society.

https://www.broadviewpress.com/product.php?productid=2133&cat=56&page=7

A Kiss from Thermopylae: Emily Dickinson and the Law.
James R. Guthrie
University of Iowa, 2015

Born into a family of attorneys, Dickinson absorbed law at home. She employed legal terms and concepts regularly in her writings, and her metaphors grounded in law derive much of their expressive power from a comparatively sophisticated lay knowledge of the various legal and political issues that were roiling nineteenth-century America. Dickinson displays interest in such areas as criminal law, contracts, equity, property, estate law, and bankruptcy. She also held in high regard the role of law in resolving disputes and maintaining civic order. Toward the end of her life, Dickinson cited the Spartans’ defense at Thermopylae as an object lesson demonstrating why societies should uphold the rule of law.

https://www.umass.edu/umpress/title/kiss-thermopylae

Critical Insights: Virginia Woolf & 20th Century Women Writers

This new collection contains essays on Woolf and some American women writers, such as Sylvia Plath and Toni Morrison.

http://www.salempress.com/press_titles.html?book=126

Critical Insights: Virginia Woolf & 20th Century Women Writers introduces readers to the major turning points that occurred during this revolutionary time period. The essays in this volume showcase the multivalent nature of Woolf’s life and fiction, along with her pervasive and varied influence on a diverse array of women writers from Britain, Ireland, America, New Zealand, and the Caribbean. The women writers that were chosen represent Woolf’s transatlantic appeal across ethnic and national lines, across affinity and influence, friendship and mentorship.