By Tsitsi Ella Jaji (NHC Fellow, 2017–18) Tsitsi Ella Jaji’s second full-length collection of poems, Mother Tongues, begins at home, with the first words and loves we learn, and the most intimate vows we swear. How deep does your language go back? Jaji’s artful verse is a three-tiered gourd of sustenance, vessel, and folklore. The tongues … Continued
By Michèle Longino (NHC Fellow, 1997–98) Michele Longino examines the ways in which Mediterranean exoticism alters the themes in French classical drama through the exploration of such plays by Corneille, Moliere and Racine as Le Cid, Medee, and Le bourgeois gentilhomme among others. She considers the role that the staging of the near Orient played … Continued
By Elizabeth K. Helsinger (NHC Fellow, 1997–98; 2007–08) In arguing for the crucial importance of song for poets in the long nineteenth century, Elizabeth Helsinger focuses on both the effects of song on lyric forms and the mythopoetics through which poets explored the affinities of poetry with song. Looking in particular at individual poets and … Continued
Edited by Charlotte Sussman (NHC Fellow, 2003–04) and Jillian Heydt-Stevenson The British Romantic era was a vibrant and exciting time in the history of the novel. Yet, aside from a few iconic books —Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein—it has been ignored or dismissed by later readers and critics. Bringing this rich but neglected body of works … Continued
By Helmut Müller-Sievers (NHC Fellow, 1994–95) The genealogy and function of epigenesis—the theory that organisms generate themselves under the guidance of a formative drive—provides a unique means of understanding the profound changes in philosophy, philosophy of language, and literature at the turn of the nineteenth century. The book begins by describing how and why epigenesis … Continued
By Antony H. Harrison (NHC Fellow, 1981–82)
Edited by Maryemma Graham (NHC Fellow, 2005–06; 2006–07) and Jerry Washington Ward The first major twenty-first century history of four hundred years of black writing, The Cambridge History of African American Literature presents a comprehensive overview of the literary traditions, oral and print, of African-descended peoples in the United States. Expert contributors, drawn from the … Continued
Edited by Sean Keilen (NHC Fellow, 2006–07), Leonard Barkan, and Bradin Cormack This book addresses works of the European Renaissance as they relate both to the world of their origins and to a modern culture that turns to the early moderns for methodological provocation and renewal. It charts the most important developments in the field … Continued
Edited by Antony H. Harrison (NHC Fellow, 1981–82) Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) has come to be considered one of the major poets–not just one of the major women poets—of the Victorian era, eclipsing her famous brother. Leading critics have demonstrated how studies of Rossetti’s work, her daily life, her relationships with the Pre-Raphaelites, and her interactions … Continued
Edited by Ronald A. Sharp (NHC Fellow, 1986–87) and Eudora Welty Famous literary friendships such as those between H.L. Mencken and James Joyce, Gustave Flaubert and Ivan Turgenev, and Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore are examined in this magnificent collection of stories, legends, poems, essays, letters, and memoirs that illuminate the breadth and depth of … Continued