Faculty bookshelf

Welcome to our bookshelf, showcasing books authored, co-authored or edited by members of our faculty.

2023

Someday We Will Look Back on this and Laugh
Published February 2023
By Tim Conley
corona\samizdat

This collection of suspicious glimpses, transitory disturbances, and apocalypses postponed makes for disorientation and even light-headedness. Readers may feel the need to laugh, but not more than is advisable. Among the assorted hijinks in these pages are a global kangaroo revolution, a fatal duel over a sneeze, spots of melancholy, a telepathic gazebo, various disguises, and a demon awaiting its release from a box of breakfast cereal.

Harriet’s Legacies
Published May 2023
Edited by Ronald Cummings and Natalee Caple
McGill-Queen’s University Press

A collection of critical and creative works exploring Black freedom and unfreedom in Canada.

Historic freedom fighter and conductor of the Underground Railroad Harriet Tubman risked her life to ferry enslaved people from America to freedom in Canada. Her legacy instigates and orients this exploration of the history of Black lives and the future of collective struggle in Canada.

Considering questions of culture, community, and futures, Harriet’s Legacies explores what happened in the wake of Tubman’s legacy and situates Canada as a key part of that dialogue.

2022

Selimus: Robert Greene
Published Spring 2022
By Mathew Martin
Broadview Press

This Broadview Edition of Robert Greene’s Selimus is the first single-volume, modernized edition of this underrated dramatic gem in over a century. First published in 1594, the play grippingly stages the bloody fratricidal warfare inaugurating the reign of Selim I (1512-20) as emperor of the Ottoman Empire. Contributing to the expansion of the range of readily available non-Shakespearean early modern English plays, the edition is designed for scholars and students alike, in the study, classroom, or theatre.

Worldmaking and Other Worlds: Restoration to Romantic
Published April 2022
Ed. Elizabeth Sauer (and Betty Joseph)
Bucknell University Press

“Worldmaking and Other Worlds: Restoration to Romantic” developed from a panel on “Other Worlds of Restoration and Early Enlightenment” organized by Betty Joseph for the forum on Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century English held at the Modern Language Association Convention in Chicago, Illinois, in 2019. Betty Joseph and Elizabeth Sauer are very grateful to Kevin L. Cope for the opportunity to produce this special issue for 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era. Our exchanges with the distinguished contributors of this volume were likewise educative, enlightening, and rewarding.

Bearers of Risk: Writing Masculinity in Contemporary English-Canadian Short Story Cycles
Published April 2022
By Neta Gordon
McGill-Queen’s University Press

Bearers of Risk unsettles popular notions of the inherent outsider status of the short story cycle while also scrutinizing expressions of recuperative masculinity politics through which men assert their right to reclaim the centre.

Literary Journalism and Social Justice
Published August 2022
By Robert Alexander and Willa McDonald (Eds.)
Palgrave Macmillan

This book examines the prominent place a commitment to social justice and equity has occupied in the global history of literary journalism. With international case studies, it explores and theorizes the way literary journalists have addressed inequality and its consequences in their practice. In the process, this volume focuses on the critical attitude the writers of this genre bring to their stories, the immersive reporting they use to gain detailed and intimate knowledge of their subjects, and the array of innovative rhetorical strategies through which they represent those encounters.  The contributors explain how these strategies encourage readers to respond to injustices of class, race, indigeneity, gender, mobility, and access to knowledge. Together, they make the case that, throughout its history, literary journalism has proven uniquely well adapted to fusing facts with feeling in a way which makes it a compelling force for social change.

Psychoanalysis and Literary Theory
Published Summer 2022
By Mathew Martin
Taylor & Francis Group

Psychoanalysis and Literary Theory introduces the key concepts, figures and movements of both psychoanalytic theory and the history of literary criticism and theory, engaging with Freud, Zizek, Plato, posthumanism, and beyond.

This book will be essential reading for academics and students of psychoanalytic studies, literary criticism, and literary theory.

The Fabulous Op
Published Spring 2022
By Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts
Beir Bua Press

The Fabulous Op, by Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts, is a collection of poetry that combines lyric poems with anti-lyric poems, concrete with conceptual, visual with abstract. It is a collaborative poem which we began by asking our social media contacts to post lines of poetry that they keep memorized, wanting the project to be grounded in the soil of the brain, the canon of the individual as sieved through their experience. We considered how the transmission of DNA is affected by the experiences of those who it both creates and describes through epigenetic processes. We imagined the canon (and our culture) to be a kind of genetic code who’s transmission is similarly affected by “the experiences of those who it both creates and describes” (unacknowledged source).

The broken lines, misshapen quotes, and misremembered poems that came back from our contacts were, not surprisingly, overwhelmingly canonical poetry. Blast the Canon! We started from this hub of foetal soup and began a process of distillation, mutation, and dilution of those source lines until we arrived at a kind of homeopathic collection of poems filled with the memory of the charge but no substance of the canon. We cooked the books so that we arrived at a reduction ad absurdum. A Fabulo Soup. A hopeful stock, a taboo fuel. It lifts and drops language, lets it break and accumulate, get tossed by the breeze. Letters get lost in the moving air. The book Operates and, by turns, sings fabulous Operas as apologies, let ambiguities accrue resonance in the Options.

2021

The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making
Published Winter 2021
By Leah Knight (Wendy Wall)
*Digital Publication*

This digital collaboration aims at allowing readers to engage with multiple, different representations and readings of Hester Pulter’s striking verse. The distinctive nature of the project is that it does not adopt an editorial process that strives to establish a single, ideal edited form for these works, but instead endorses multiple, equally authorized versions as a way to foreground the complexity of Pulter’s poetics and the affordances of scholarly editing in the digital age.

The Massacre at Paris by Christopher Marlowe
Published August 2021
By Mathew R. Martin
Manchester University Press

This volume presents a modernised edition of Christopher Marlowe’s critical engagement with one of the bloodiest and traumatic episodes of the French Wars of Religion, the wholesale massacre of French Huguenots in Paris in August, 1572. Sensorily shocking and intellectually gripping, the play’s dramatic action spans a tumultuous two decades in French history to unfold for its audience the tragic consequences of religious fanaticism, power politics, and dynastic rivalry.

Finding Nothing: The Vangardes, 1959-1975
Published August 2021
By Gregory Betts
University of Toronto Press

Winner2021 Gabrielle Roy Prize awarded by The Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures
WinnerBasil Stuart-Stubbs Book Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Book on British Columbia

Finding Nothing traces the rise of the radical avant-garde in Vancouver, from the initial salvos of the Tish group, through Blewointment’s spatial experiments, to radical Surrealisms and new feminisms. Incorporating images, original texts, and interviews, Gregory Betts shows how the VanGardes signalled a remarkable consciousness of the globalized forces at play in the city, impacting communities, orientations, races, and nations.

Foundry
Published Winter 2021
By Gregory Betts
RedFoxPress

“These poems are assembled in honour of the 15th century Indian poet Narsinh Mehta. He suffered domestic abuse, but realised his broken parts were the cobblestones on a path to wholeness. He wrote through his brokenness, modelling linguistic reincarnation, and resolved to produce 22,000 bhajans (devotional songs). Though these poems were revered in his lifetime, his works only appeared in print more than a century after his death – with many variations and discrepancies. For this series, I am using scattered pieces of a font developed by the Gujarati Type Foundry in 1940 for use in advertising copy text and design. The font creates its character set with 32 patterns that are re-assembled and re-used as the castings or basic elements of its alphabet.”

Dazzle Pods
Published 2021
Catherine Heard & Gregory Betts
Arts + Letters Press

The Dazzle Pods is a book-length collaboration with the Canadian Surrealist artist Catherine Heard. Each poem by Betts is accompanied by an image of a fabric creature made by Heard. The poems weave the strange mythology of the Dazzle Pods. These impossible-to-resist creatures bend time and space in their secret governance of the universe. The Dazzle Pods were exhibited at Play/Ground Resource Art in 2018.

2020

Queer Canada Special Issue of the Journal of Canadian Studies
Published Spring 2020
Dr. Ronald Cummings
University of Toronto Press

This discussion offers a reflection on some of the shifts and developments in the field of queer studies in Canada since the turn of the century. It situates these developments against, and in relation to, a longer history of queer politics in Canada while also emphasizing key moments and critical turns.

Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies
By Leah Knight (Wendy Wall)
Published Spring 2020
Project Muse

The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies is the official publication of the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies and regularly publishes articles and reviews on cultural history from the late fifteenth to the late nineteenth centuries.

Afterlives of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat
By Ann Howey
Published 2020
Springer Link

This book investigates adaptations of The Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat in Victorian and post-Victorian popular culture to explore their engagement with medievalism, social constructions of gender, and representations of the role of art in society.

Paper-contestations’ and Textual Communities in England, 1640-1675
By Elizabeth Sauer
Published August 2020
University of Toronto Press

The mass production and dissemination of printed materials were unparalleled in England during the 1640s and 50s. While theatrical performance traditionally defined literary culture, print steadily gained ground, becoming more prevalent and enabling the formation of various networks of writers, readers, and consumers of books.

The Varieties of Joycean Experience
By Tim Conley
Published: December 2020
Anthem Irish Studies

A collection of essays on Joyce’s work stressing variations of approach. Forays into and across Joyce’s oeuvre would draw upon a number of new and recent modes of criticism, including textual genetics, cognitive studies, and ecocriticism.

Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1970–2020
By Ronald Cummings & (Alison Donnell- UOEA)
Published: December 2020
Cambridge University Press

The period from the 1970s to the present day has produced an extraordinarily rich and diverse body of Caribbean writing that has been widely acclaimed.

2019

Avant Canada: Poets, Prophets, Revolutionaries 
By Gregory Betts (Christian Bok)
Published January 2019
Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Avant Canada presents a rich collection of original essays and creative works on a representative array of avant-garde literary movements in Canada from the past fifty years. From the work of Leonard Cohen and bpNichol to that of Jordan Abel and Liz Howard, Avant Canada features twenty-eight of the best writers and critics in the field.

Collapsible
By Tim Conley
Published February 2019
New Star Books

Fiction. Short Stories. The short story form is unambiguously un-dead in this new album of thirty fictions from Tim Conley, coming at the reader in a variety of shapes and guises running the gamut from elliptical micro-fictions to tales of the inexplicable.

Emergent Nation: Early Modern British Literature Transition, 1660-1714: Volume 3
By Elizabeth Sauer
Publish February 2019
Cambridge University Press

The years 1660 to 1714 represent a fraught transitional period, one caught between two now dominant periodization rubrics: early modern and the long eighteenth century. Containing narratives of disruption, restoration, and reconfiguration, Emergent Nation: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1660-1714 explores the conjunctions and disjunctions between historical and literary developments in this period, when the sociable, rivalrous textual world of letters registered and accelerated changes.

Love in the Chthulucene (Chthulucene)
By Natalee Caple
Published April 2019
Wolsak and Wynn

In a collection grappling with #MeToo, climate change and political turmoil, Natalee Caple strives to discover a way forward in charged times. These poems look to acknowledge struggle, to re-evaluate society and to rethink our approach to art. This is a challenging collection, but also a personal one.

The Broadview Introduction to Literature
By Neta Gordon (Lisa Chalykoff and Paul Lumsden)
Published June 2019
Broadview Press

A contemporary, Canadian, and diverse update of Broadview’s concise introduction to literature. Pedagogically current and uncommon in its breadth of representation, The Broadview Introduction to Literature invites students into the world of literary study in a truly distinctive way.

The Quarry
By Adam Dickinson
Published 2019
Small Walker Press 

In the Fall of 2018, the Small Walker Press invited poet Adam Dickinson and artist Lorène Bourgeois to walk through a former landfill (1976-2001), the Glenridge Quarry Naturalization Site. Located on the Niagara Escarpment, overlooking the City of St. Catharines, Ontario, it functions today as a public recreation area. Its landscape still resembles a raw, industrialized version of nature, eerie and ominous in its windswept hills. The ground is punctuated by prickly vegetation providing beautiful flowers in the summer months, and rocks, from pebbles and gravel to larger boulders.

2018

Anatomic
By: Adam Dickinson
Published April 2018
Coach House Books 

Anatomic is a poetry book that has emerged from biomonitoring and microbiome testing on the author’s body to look at the wayThe poems of Anatomic have emerged from biomonitoring and microbiome testing on the author’s body to examine the way the outside writes the inside, both harmfully and necessarily.

Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain
By Leah Knight & Elizabeth Sauer (Micheline White)
Published 2018
University of Michigan Press

Women in 16th- and 17th-century Britain read, annotated, circulated, inventoried, cherished, criticized, prescribed, and proscribed books in various historically distinctive ways. Yet, unlike that of their male counterparts, the study of women’s reading practices and book ownership has been an elusive and largely overlooked field.

Fear and Loathing Worldwide
By Robert Alexander
Published July 2018
Bloomsbury Academic

For more than 40 years, the radically subjective style of participatory journalism known as Gonzo has been inextricably associated with the American writer Hunter S. Thompson. Around the world, however, other journalists approach unconventional material in risky ways, placing themselves in the middle of off-beat stories, and relate those accounts in the supercharged rhetoric of Gonzo.

Temperance and Cosmopolitanism African American Reformers in the Atlantic World
By Carole Lynn Stewart
Published October 2018
Penn State University Press

Temperance and Cosmopolitanism explores the nature and meaning of cosmopolitan freedom in the nineteenth century through a study of selected African American authors and reformers: William Wells Brown, Martin Delany, George Moses Horton, Frances E. W. Harper, and Amanda Berry Smith. Their voluntary travels, a reversal of the involuntary movement of enslavement, form the basis for a critical mode of cosmopolitan freedom rooted in temperance.

David and Bathsheba by George Peele
By Mathew R. Martin
Published June 2018
Manchester University Press

David and Bathsheba presents a modernised edition of one of only two surviving biblical dramas written for the early modern English professional stage, George Peele’s explosive biblical drama about the tangled lives, deadly liaisons, and twisted histories of Ancient Israel’s royal family. The play begins with the onset of the affair between David and Bathsheba and proceeds to unravel the affair’s horrible personal and political consequences. Martin’s critical edition is the first modern single-volume edition of the play since W.W. Greg’s 1912 facsimile edition. Comprehensively introduced and containing full commentary notes, the edition opens up this unduly neglected but historically significant and dramatically powerful gem of English Renaissance drama to student and scholar alike.

2017

Useless Joyce: Textual Functions, Cultural Appropriations
By Tim Conley
Published October 2017
University of Toronto Press

Tim Conley’s Useless Joyce provocatively analyses Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and takes the reader on a journey exploring the perennial question of the usefulness of literature and art. Conley argues that the works of James Joyce, often thought difficult and far from practical, are in fact polymorphous meditations on this question.

Milton Studies: Volume 58, Milton in the Americas
By Elizabeth Sauer
Published October 2017
Penn State University Press

Traditionally hailed as a champion of various forms of liberty and toleration, and creator of a new-modeled Eden, Milton came to occupy a privileged place in genealogies of liberalism, modernity, and the history of revolution against repression. In the decades immediately following the American Revolution alone (1765-1783), Milton’s collected poems were produced in about 28 different Anglo-American editions, and more recently his influence in Latin American writing has been noted.

 

2016

A Tour of Fabletown: Patterns and Plots in Bill Willingham’s Fables
By Neta Gordon
Published March 2016
McFarland & Company

In 2002, Vertigo/DC Comics published the first issue of Bill Willingham’s Fables. The series imagined the lives of fairy tale figures–Snow White, the Big Bad Wolf, Cinderella and the ubiquitous Prince Charming, among many others–as they made new lives for themselves in modern-day New York City, having fled their storied homeworlds following an invasion. After 150 issues and many awards, Fables concluded its run in July 2015.

Tragedy And Trauma In The Plays Of Christopher Marlowe
By Mathew R. Martin
Published March 2016
Routledge

Contending that criticism of Marlowe’s plays has been limited by humanist conceptions of tragedy, this book engages with trauma theory, especially psychoanalytic trauma theory, to offer a fresh critical perspective within which to make sense of the tension in Marlowe’s plays between the tragic and the traumatic.

A Long the Krommerun
By Tim Conley (with Onno Kosters and Peter de Voogd)
Published April 2016
Brill Publishing

A LONG THE KROMMERUN offers a selection of the best papers from the 2014 Utrecht James Joyce Symposium, presenting fresh insights into Joyce’s works, with particular attention to the Dutch based aesthetic movement known as De Stijl.

Counterblasting Canada: Marshall McLuhan, Wyndham Lewis, Wilfred Watson, and Sheila Watson
By Gregory Betts (Paul Hjartarson, Kristine Smitka, Adam Hammond, Dean Irvine, Elena Lamberti, Philip Monk, Linda Morra)
Published June 2016
University of Alberta Press

In 1914, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis-the founders of Vorticism-undertook an unprecedented analysis of the present, its technologies, communication, politics, and architecture. The essays in Counterblasting Canada trace the influence of Vorticism on Marshall McLuhan and Canadian Modernism.

Reading Green in Early Modern England
By Leah Knight
Published August 2016
Routeledge

Green in early modern England did not mean what it does today; but what did it mean? Unveiling various versions and interpretations of green, this book offers a cultural history of a color that illuminates the distinctive valences greenness possessed in early modern culture. While treating green as a panacea for anything from sore eyes to sick minds, early moderns also perceived verdure as responsive to their verse, sympathetic to their sufferings, and endowed with surprising powers of animation

Gender at Work in Victorian Culture
By Martin Danahay
Published December 2016
Routledge 

Martin A. Danahay’s lucidly argued and accessibly written volume offers a solid introduction to important issues surrounding the definition and division of labor in British society and culture. ‘Work,’ Danahay argues, was a term rife with ideological contradictions for Victorian males during a period when it was considered synonymous with masculinity. Male writers and artists in particular found their labors troubled by class and gender ideologies that idealized ‘man’s work’ as sweaty, muscled labor and tended to feminize intellectual and artistic pursuits.

2015

Dance Moves of the Near Future
By Tim Conley
Published May 2015
New Star Books

The 24 stories in Dance Moves of the Near Future open with a sentient cactus and close with a crash of rhinos. In between you’ll find a high–strung parrot, untenured yahoos, an amorphous, mind–controlling blob, optometrists in a strip club, a dash of Old Testament shenanigans, and weighty ontological concerns. These stories are unpredictable — even volatile — but they all share a wicked sense of humour, and a piercing eye for human (and inhuman) fallibility.

Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising
By Lynn Arner
Published May 2015
Penn State University Press

haucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising examines the transmission of Greco-Roman and European literature into English during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, while literacy was burgeoning among men and women from the nonruling classes. This dissemination offered a radically democratizing potential for accessing, interpreting, and deploying learned texts. Focusing primarily on an overlooked sector of Chaucer’s and Gower’s early readership, namely, the upper strata of nonruling urban classes, Lynn Arner argues that Chaucer’s and Gower’s writings engaged in elaborate processes of constructing cultural expertise.

The Famous Victories of Henry V
By Mathew R. Martin
Published 2015
QME

The Queen’s Men were the foremost theatrical company of the 1580s, an all-star troupe formed in the Queen’s name by her chief advisor Sir Francis Walsingham, and her close ally the Earl of Leicester. From 1583 through to Elizabeth’s death in 1603, they toured the provinces of England performing plays that celebrated national and Protestant virtues. The Queen’s Men Editions publishes the plays associated with the company in performance editions that incorporate textual scholarship with production records of modern performances of the plays.

2014

Doubtful Points: Joyce and Punctuation
By Dr. Tim Conley (with Elizabeth M. Bonapfel)
Published 2014
Brill Publishing

As unusual or esoteric as the subject might seem, Joyce’s punctuation offers a way to study and appreciate his stylistic innovations and the materiality of his textual productions. Joyce’s shunning of what he called “perverted commas” and the general absence of punctuation in Molly Bloom’s monologue are only the most infamous instances of a deeply idiosyncratic and changeable use of punctuation.

Catching the Torch
By Neta Gordon
Published February 2014
Wilfrid Laurier University Press

“Catching the Torch” examines contemporary novels and plays written about Canada’s participation in World War I. Exploring such works as Jane Urquhart’s “The Underpainter” and “The Stone Carvers,” Jack Hodgins’s “Broken Ground,” Kevin Kerr’s “Unity” (1918), Stephen Massicotte’s “Mary’s Wedding,” and Frances Itani’s “Deafening,” the book considers how writers have dealt with the compelling myth that the Canadian nation was born in the trenches of the Great War.

Contemporary Marxist Theory
By Dr. Andrew Pendakis (Jeff Diamanti, Nicholas Brown, Josh Robinson, and Imre Szeman)
Published October 2014
Bloomsbury 

This volume brings together works written by international theorists since the fall of the Berlin Wall, showing how today’s crisis-ridden global capitalism is making Marxist theory more relevant and necessary than ever. This collection of key texts by prominent and lesser-known thinkers from Latin America, Asia, Africa, America, and Europe showcases an area of scholarly analysis whose impact on academic and popular discourses as well as political action will only grow in the coming years.

Tamburlaine the Great Part 1 and Part 2 by Christopher Marlowe
By Dr. Mathew R. Martin
Published March 2014
Broadview Press

Tamburlaine the Great, Part One and Part Two are the first plays that Christopher Marlowe wrote for London’s then new freestanding, open-air public playhouses. They trace the progress of Tamburlaine, a Central Asian leader, as he “scourge[s] kingdoms with his conquering sword” and rises to imperial power. The plays were a powerful beginning to Marlowe’s brief career as a public theatre dramatist: the brutally masculine and martial main character immediately captured audiences, and the plays were widely imitated and parodied. Even four hundred years later, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine remains a shocking and seductive figure.

2013

Avant-Garde Canadian Literature
By Gregory Betts
Published February 2013
University of Toronto Press

In Avant-Garde Canadian Literature, Gregory Betts draws attention to the fact that the avant-garde has had a presence in Canada long before the country’s literary histories have recognized, and that the radicalism of avant-garde art has been sabotaged by pedestrian terms of engagement by the Canadian media, the public, and the literary critics. This book presents a rich body of evidence to illustrate the extent to which Canadians have been producing avant-garde art since the start of the twentieth century.

In Calamity’s Wake
By Natalee Caple
Published April 2013
Bloomsbury USA

Set in the Badlands of the North American West in the late 1800s, In Calamity’s Wake tells the story of Miette’s quest across a landscape occupied by strangers, ghosts, and animals. On her journey she meets an old lover of her father’s, a man who claims to be her brother, an imposter she thinks is her mother, Negro minstrel Lew Spencer, a kind madam who is her mother’s best friend, a wolf who longs to protect her, and many others.

The Polymers
By Adam Dickinson
Published April 2013
House of Anansi

The Polymers is a bold new work from one of our most ambitious poetic minds. Structured as an imaginary science project, the varied pieces in this collection investigate the intersection of poetry and chemicals, specifically plastics, attempting to understand their essential role in culture. Through various procedures, constraints, and formal mutations, the poems express the repeating structures fundamental to plastic molecules as they appear in cultural and linguistic behaviours such as arguments, anxieties, and trends.

Jane Austen and Animals
By Barbara Seeber
Published July 2013
Routeledge

The first full-length study of animals in Jane Austen, Barbara K. Seeber’s book situates the author’s work within the serious debates about human-animal relations that began in the eighteenth century and continued into Austen’s lifetime. Seeber shows that Austen’s writings consistently align the objectification of nature with that of women and that Austen associates the hunting, shooting, racing, and consuming of animals with the domination of women.

The Slow Professor
By Barbara K. Seeber (Maggie Berg)
Published August 2013
University of Toronto Press

If there is one sector of society that should be cultivating deep thought in itself and others, it is academia. Yet the corporatisation of the contemporary university has sped up the clock, demanding increased speed and efficiency from faculty regardless of the consequences for education and scholarship.

Milton, Toleration, and Nationhood
By Elizabeth Sauer
Published December 2013
Cambridge University Press

John Milton lived at a time when English nationalism became entangled with principles and policies of cultural, religious, and ethnic tolerance. Combining political theory with close readings of key texts, this study examines how Milton’s polemical and imaginative literature intersects with representations of English Protestant nationhood. Through detailed case studies of Milton’s works, Elizabeth Sauer charts the fluctuating narrative of Milton’s literary engagements in relation to social, political, and philosophical themes such as ecclesiology, exclusionism, Irish alterity, natural law, disestablishment, geography, and intermarriage

Doctor Faustus
By Mathew Martin (Christopher Marlowe)
Published June 2013
Broadview Press Inc

The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, commonly referred to simply as Doctor Faustus, is an Elizabethan tragedy by Christopher Marlowe, based on German stories about the title character Faust, that was first performed sometime between 1588 and Marlowe’s death in 1593. Two different versions of the play were published in the Jacobean era, several years later.

2012

Burning City
By Tim Conley (with Jed Rasula)
Published January 2012
Action Books

Burning City acts as a “multisensory Baedecker” to the many incarnations of international modernism from 1910-1939. Inspired by the abandoned plans of the early avant-garde poet Yvan Goll to write a history of modernity through the poetry of that era, scholars Jed Rasula and Tim Conley have carried out Goll’s project, scouring the small journals and magazines of the period for both lost and seminal texts.

The New Milton Criticism
By Elizabeth Sauer
Published April 2012
Cambridge University Press

The New Milton Criticism seeks to emphasize ambivalence and discontinuity in Milton’s work and interrogate the assumptions and certainties in previous Milton scholarship. Contributors to the volume move Milton’s open-ended poetics to the centre of Milton studies by showing how analysing irresolvable questions – religious, philosophical and literary critical – transforms interpretation and enriches appreciation of his work. The New Milton Criticism encourages scholars to embrace uncertainties in his writings rather than attempt to explain them away. Twelve critics from a range of countries, approaches and methodologies explore these questions in these new readings of Paradise Lost and other works.

2011

Strange Jeremiahs
By Carole Stewart
Published March 2011
University of New Mexico Press

Over the last few decades the notion of civil religion has gained parlance as a way of making sense of American culture and religion. The term civil religion, often used simply to mean patriotism, refers in this text to the religious styles and rhetoric that emerge from the act of founding of the American Republic as a democratic nation. The author examines the work of three major American authors whose lives span 250 years and who, in spite of their different heritages, all expressed themselves through the tradition of the jeremiad, or prophetic judgment of a people for backsliding from their destiny.

The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe
By Mathew Martin
Published December 2011
Broadview Press

First performed by Shakespeare’s rivals in the 1590s, Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta was a trend-setting, innovative play whose dark comedy and final tragic irony illuminate and interrogate the darker regions of the Elizabethan cultural imagination. Although by law banished from England in 1291, the Jew in the form of Barabas, the play’s protagonist, returns on the stage both to embody and to challenge the dramatic and cultural anti-semitic stereotypes out of which he is constructed. The result is a theatrically sophisticated but deeply unsettling play whose rich cultural significance extends beyond the early modern period to the present day.

2010

Edward the Second by Christopher Marlowe
By Mathew Martin
Published October 2010
Broadview Press

Depicting with shocking openness the sexual and political violence of its central characters’ fates, Edward the Second broke new dramatic ground in English theatre. The play charts the tragic rise and fall of the medieval English monarch Edward the Second, his favourite Piers Gaveston, and their ambitious opponents Queen Isabella and Mortimer Jr., and is an important cultural, as well as dramatic, document of the early modern period.

2009

Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England
By Leah Knight
Published April 2009
Routledge

Contemplating the textual gardens, poetic garlands, and epigrammatic groves which dot the landscape of early modern English print, Leah Knight exposes and analyzes the close configuration of plants and writing in the period. She argues that the early modern cultures and cultivation of plants and books depended on each other in historically specific and novel ways that yielded a profusion of linguistic, conceptual, metaphorical, and material intersections. Examining both poetic and botanical texts, as well as the poetics of botanical texts, this study focuses on the two outstanding English botanical writers of the sixteenth century, William Turner and John Gerard, to suggest the unexpected historical relationship between literature and science in the early modern genre of the herbal.

Staging Pain, 1580–1800: Violence and Trauma in British Theater
By James Allard & Mathew R. Martin
Published Aug 2009
Routledge

Bookending the chronology of this collection are two crucial moments in the histories of pain, trauma, and their staging in British theater: the establishment of secular and professional theater in London in the 1580s, and the growing dissatisfaction with theatrical modes of public punishment alongside the increasing efficacy of staging extravagant spectacles at the end of the eighteenth century.

2008 & Older

Romanticism, Medicine, and the Poet’s Body. the Nineteenth Century Series
By James Allard
Published October 2007
Ashgate Publishing

James Allard’s book restores the physical body to its proper place in Romantic studies by exploring the status of the human body during the stunning historical moment that witnessed the emergence of Romantic literature alongside the professionalization of medical practice. His central subject is the Poet-Physician, a hybrid figure in the works of the medically trained Keats, Thelwall, and Beddoes, who embodies the struggles over discrepancies and affinities between medicine and poetry.

Milton and Toleration
By Elizabeth Sauer (Sharon Achinstein)
Published August 2007
Oxford University Press

This book locates John Milton’s works in national and international contexts, and applies a variety of approaches from literary to historical, philosophical, and postcolonial. Through this, it aims to offer a wide-ranging exploration of how Milton’s visions of tolerance reveal deeper movements in the history of the imagination.

Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory 
By Lynn Arner
Published 2007
Taylor & Frances Online

Following a brief biographical sketch of Sheila Delany, the introduction to this special issue focuses on Delany’s oeuvre, discussing her most celebrated work and locating her scholarship within some of the intellectual debates in which she participated from 1967 through 2006. As a young activist invested in Marxism, Delany critiqued New Criticism’s promotion of bourgeois ideologies and argued for the expansion of the canon, to include thinkers who represent a tradition of dissent.

Kingdom, Phylum 
By Adam Dickinson
Published 2007
Brick Books

Adam Dickinson’s poems, with firm intellectual bite and imaginative scope, reach fresh levels of poetic – and ecological – awareness. Sometimes reminiscent of Wallace Stevens, sometimes of Christopher Dewdney, and with the ghost of Foucault always in attendance, they ply a language that is cool and precise on the surface to open into the deep resonance of geologic time. Imaginative and contemplative, this writing is bound to refresh the vision of the most world-weary reader.

Milton and Climates of Reading
By Elizabeth Sauer
Published July 2006
University of Toronto Press

Scholarly criticism of John Milton’s writings has in recent decades been distinguished by a methodological prudence that separates it from other forms of literary scholarship. One critic, however, stands apart from his colleagues and has consistently offered a corrective to this prudence: Balachandra Rajan. In Milton and the Climates of Reading, Elizabeth Sauer undertakes the daunting work of bringing together a selection of Rajan’s essays on Milton, some hitherto unpublished, in order to chart trends and changes in Milton scholarship over the last sixty years and to consider future directions in this vital field of inquiry

Between Theater and Philosophy: Skepticism in the Major City Comedies of Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton
By Mathew R. Martin
Published July 2001
University of Delaware Press

This book studies the major city comedies of Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton in the context of the quarrel between theater and philosophy. The book presents deconstructive and materialist readings of Jonson’s Volpone, Epicoene, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair and Middleton’s Michaelmas Term, A Trick to Catch the Old One, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside

General Consent in Jane Austen: A Study of Dialogism
By Barbara Seeber
Published August 2000
McGill-Queen’s University Press

General Consent in Jane Austen examines the “early” and “late” novels as well as the juvenilia in the light of three paradigms: “The Other Heroine” focuses on voices that challenge and compete with the central heroines, “Cameo Appearances” examines buried past narratives, and “Investigating Crimes” explores acts of violence. These three avenues into dialogic space destabilize conventional readings of Austen. The Bakhtinian model that structures this book is not one of linearity and balance but one of conflict, simultaneity, and multiplicity. While some novels fit into only one paradigm, others incorporate more than one; Mansfield Park receives the most attention.