The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in 19th-Century Britain and Ireland
Sara Maurer
Assistant Professor
Maurer connects the Victorian novel’s preoccupation with the landed estate to 19th century debates about property, specifically as it played out in the English occupation of Ireland. By focusing on the ownership of land, The Dispossessed State challenges current scholarly tendencies to talk about Victorian property solely as a commodity.
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012
The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left (40th anniversary edition)
William O’Rourke
Professor
O’Rourke speaks to a new generation of readers interested in American history and the religious anti-war protest movements of the Vietnam era. He brings to life the seven anti-war activists who were vigorously prosecuted for alleged criminal plots, filling in the drama of the case, the trial, the events, the demonstrations, the panels, and the people. He includes a new afterword that presents a sketch of the evolution of protest groups from the 1960s and 1970s, including the history of the New Catholic Left over the past four decades.
University of Notre Dame Press, 2012
A Wandering Aramaean: Passover Poems and Translations
Henry Weinfield
Professor, Program of Liberal Studies; concurrent in Department of English
Weinfield offers the reader original poems and renderings of biblical verses on Elijah and Moses. As reviewer David H. Aaron writes, “The contemporary dilemmas of particularism and identity are outlined in terms of the mythic characters of the Bible and then shadowed by the predicament of the diaspora Jew’s and Israeli’s place in today’s world.”
Entrance to a Colonial Pageant in Which We All Begin to Intricate
Johannes Göransson
Assistant Professor
This hybrid work is an original combination of poetry, prose, essay, theatre production, and instruction manual. As reviewer Nick Demske writes, “Göransson pays the ultimate penance and shoulders the heaviest burden: to reflect a culture accurately, no matter how disfigured. His art drinks deep of the disease it most fears so that we can learn more from his symptoms. He’s the Poet Laureate of the Coal Mine, our savior canary, dying and producing perpetually death-obsessed art that we might all be spared.”
Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic
Sandra Gustafson
Associate Professor
In this book, Gustafson combines historical literary analysis and political theory to demonstrate that current democratic practices of deliberation are rooted in the civic rhetoric that flourished in the early American republic. Examining seven key writers from the early American republic—including James Fenimore Cooper, David Crockett, and Daniel Webster—she offers a mode of historical and textual analysis that displays the wide range of resources imaginative language can contribute to political life. Choice gives it a high recommendation and says “all Americans, not just literary scholars and historians, can benefit.”
University of Chicago Press, 2011
The Open Light: Poets From Notre Dame, 1991–2008
Orlando Menes, editor
Associate Professor
This anthology celebrates the distinction and diversity of poets associated with the University over a period of nearly two decades. In the preface, Menes presents a brief historical account of poetry at Notre Dame since 1991, emphasizing the remarkable range of talent and the establishment of both The Notre Dame Review and the Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize. The plethora of voices included in this collection and the poems themselves provide a rich and vibrant legacy of poetry at Notre Dame.
University of Notre Dame Press, 2011
Cambridge Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Poetry
John Sitter
Mary Lee Duda Professor of Literature
This critical survey brings the techniques and the major poets of the period 1700–1785 to life. An approachable introduction, the book provides a grounding in poetic analysis intended to be useful for students, teachers, and general readers of literature. It provides detailed readings of individual works by poets from Anne Finch, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope to Thomas Gray, William Cowper, and Anna Barbauld. Later chapters emphasize 18th century poetry’s use of personification, social critique, and ecological perspectives.
Cambridge University Press, 2011
Frances Burney: The Life in the Works
Margaret Doody
John and Barbara Glynn Family Professor of Literature
Combining biographical narrative with informed literary criticism, Doody analyzes not only Burney’s published novels, but her plays, fragments of novels, poems, and other works never published. She also draws upon a mine of letters and diaries for detailed and sometimes surprising biographical information. A novelist herself, Doody shows an appreciation of the many dimensions of a predecessor's writings, and she tells her story with force and conviction.
Cambridge University Press, 2012 reprint; originally published in 1989
Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays
Margaret Doody
John and Barbara Glynn Family Professor of Literature
This volume was created to mark the 300th anniversary of Samuel Richardson’s birth, with 15 essays, some illustrated, by contributors who investigate various aspects of the novelist’s work. Subjects range from an examination of reactions to Pamela to observations on patterns of male friendship in the novels.
Cambridge University Press, 2011 reprint; originally published in 1989
The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America
Laura Dassow Walls
William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English
Explorer, scientist, writer, and humanist, Alexander von Humboldt was the most famous intellectual of the age that began with Napoleon and ended with Darwin. With Cosmos, the book that crowned his career, Humboldt offered to the world his vision of humans and nature as integrated halves of a single whole. Walls here traces Humboldt’s ideas for Cosmos to his 1799–1804 journey to the Americas, where he first experienced the diversity of nature and of the world’s peoples, and follows the widespread influence of Humboldt’s ideas on U.S. American literature, science, culture, and politics.
University of Chicago Press, 2011 paperback; originally published in 2009