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The freedom dilemma: Milton's (and Adam's) inability to reconcile reason and authority Literature & History Pub Date : 2022-12-08 Benjamin Woodford
Much scholarship on the separation scene in Paradise Lost focuses on whether or not Adam could have acted differently to prevent Eve from working alone. The separation scene, however, is impossible...
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“Not the mother type”: Exploding the Myth of Maternal Devotion in Marghanita Laski's To Bed with Grand Music Literature & History Pub Date : 2022-11-24 Genevieve Brassard
Second World War propaganda targeted women in conflicting ways, expecting them to contribute to the war effort while also upholding an idealized view of motherhood as essential to women's identitie...
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Editorial Literature & History Pub Date : 2022-05-31 Emrys Jones, James Morland, Vike Plock, Helen Smith, Andrew Thacker
‘The past cannot speak, except through its “archive”’.1 Stuart Hall Editing Literature & History, like all forms of academic work over the past two years, has been greatly affected by the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic. Its editors, contributors and publishers have faced personal and professional challenges that have overlapped and shaped one another in the face of unfolding national and international
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Les Soirées de Médan, the Franco-Prussian War and Naturalist Group Identity Literature & History Pub Date : 2022-05-31 Katherine Ashley
The Franco-Prussian War was not only a watershed in the history of Europe, it also inspired a watershed moment in French literary history: the publication of Les Soirées de Médan in 1880. The short...
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‘There are Many Strange Animals that will Repay […] study’1: Humour and Identity in Trench-Newspaper Natural Histories Literature & History Pub Date : 2022-05-31 Emily Anderson
During the First World War, trench newspapers regularly printed parodies of natural history, depicting servicemen as half-human, half-animal creatures. These parodies present a new angle on the rol...
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Dueling and the Fantasmatic Specter of Male Honour in Imperial Germany: The Kaiser’s Will and Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest Literature & History Pub Date : 2022-04-12 Jeffrey Schneider
Underneath the historiographical disagreements about military honor and dueling in Imperial Germany there lurks a consensus that most duelists simply internalized the dictates of honor. This article troubles that presumption by attending to the Prussian-German military honor code’s mixed messages and impossible demands, which I interpret through Slavoj Žižek’s concept of a fantasmatic specter. After
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After Chernobyl: Welsh Poetry and Nuclear Power Literature & History Pub Date : 2022-04-11 Neal Alexander,Jamie Harris
This article examines the responses of Welsh poets, writing in both English and Welsh, to nuclear power in the period after the Chernobyl disaster of April 1986. Fall-out from Chernobyl contaminated upland areas of North Wales adjacent to the country's two nuclear power stations, Trawsfynydd and Wylfa, prompting a backlash against the nuclear industry. Welsh poets played key roles in the anti-nuclear
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Constructing the Crime Canon: Dorothy L. Sayers as an Anthologist Literature & History Pub Date : 2022-02-03 Victoria Stewart
A consideration of Dorothy L. Sayers's work as an anthologist of short detective fiction during the late 1920s and early 1930s shows how, though hemmed in by considerations of cost and copyright, Sayers used the compiling of anthologies both as a means of promoting her ideas about the detective form and to foster connections with fellow practitioners. An analysis of Sayers's five anthologies shows
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‘A Menace to England’: The Egg Collector as Arch-Villain in Two 1940s Bird Novels Literature & History Pub Date : 2022-02-03 Joanna C. Dobson
This paper examines the figure of the egg collector as an arch-villain in two novels about rare birds that were published in the 1940s: Adventure Lit Their Star by Kenneth Allsop, and The Awl Birds by J.K. Stanford. Drawing on insights from birdwatching literature published in the same period, I demonstrate that the extreme vilification of the egg collector in both texts represents a dramatic change
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‘Fear of the Blind’: Political Vision and Postwar Ethics in the Poetry of Denise Levertov Literature & History Pub Date : 2022-02-03 John Wrighton
Denise Levertov is regarded as a key figure in the New American Poetry and a committed political activist of the 1960s counterculture. Reading a treatise on poetry contained in Emmanuel Levinas’s Existence and Existents (1947) alongside Levertov’s early poems prior to her adoption of the American idiom, this essay re-positions the poet as the pathfinder of an intense period of assimilation in the immediate
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Narrating the Nation? National Identity and the Uncanny in De Bernières’ Birds without Wings Literature & History Pub Date : 2022-02-03 Catherine MacMillan
Informed primarily by Bhabha and Kristeva's theories of national identity and the uncanny, the article examines the themes of nation building, migration and the uncanny in Louis de Bernières’ Birds Without Wings. It also explores the cosmopolitan nature of the late Ottoman Empire, as portrayed by de Bernières, from the perspective of critical cosmopolitan theory and Bhabha's concept of vernacular cosmopolitanism
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Book Review: Scottish Colonial Literature: Writing the Atlantic, 1603–1707 by Kirsten Sandrock Literature & History Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Allison L. Steenson
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Book Review: Besieged: Early Modern Siege Literature 1642–1722 by Sharon Alker and Holly Faith Nelson Literature & History Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Vanita Neelakanta
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Book Review: No Kids Allowed: Children's Literature for Adults by Michelle Ann Abate Literature & History Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Andy McCormack,Madeleine Hunter
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‘Undoubtedly Love Letters’? Olive Schreiner’s Letters to Karl Pearson Literature & History Pub Date : 2021-05-05 Helen Dampier
Letters have sometimes been assumed to be a private form of life writing, and certainly many of the South African writer Olive Schreiner’s (1855–1920) letters have been read in this way. However, her letters trouble any simple, binary notions of public and private. This article offers a re-reading of Schreiner’s letters to the statistician and founder of the Men and Women’s Club, Karl Pearson (1857–1936)
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Alien Internment in John Galsworthy’s ‘The Bright Side’ and ‘The Dog It was that Died’ Literature & History Pub Date : 2021-05-05 Jill Felicity Durey
This article illuminates two short stories by John Galsworthy through examining them with the help of his diaries and letters, a handful of unpublished letters by his nephew from an internment camp and secondary historical sources. It argues that the stories, when read in conjunction with these sources, are highly revealing about human nature during Second World War and also about Galsworthy’s prescient
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‘Causing misery and suffering miserably’: Representations of the Thirty Years’ War in Literature and History Literature & History Pub Date : 2021-05-05 Siobhan Talbott
This article examines a range of fictional literature – poetry, prose, play and song produced between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries – that represents aspects of the Thirty Years’ War, a conflict fought in Europe from 1618 to 1648. Depiction of the Thirty Years’ War in literary works is compared to that found in empirical historical evidence and historians’ analyses. It is concluded that
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Authors and Artemus Jones: Libel Reform in England, 1910–52 Literature & History Pub Date : 2021-05-05 Christopher Hilliard
This article argues that the novel was collateral damage in English law’s reaction to mass-market newspapers. A 1910 court decision made the writer’s intention irrelevant in libel cases. As a result, publishers became vulnerable to defamation suits from people unknown to a novelist but who happened to share a name with a fictional character. Drawing on the Society of Authors archive and the records
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Sarah Wasserman, The Death of Things: Ephemera and the American Novel Literature & History Pub Date : 2021-05-01 Lynda Prescott
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Elizabeth Outka, Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature Literature & History Pub Date : 2021-05-01 Rachel Crossland
to actively attack the mimicry of crypsis and prioritise semantic instability in order to achieve a transcendent artistic individualism. Here one might wish for a return to the visual analysis of the first chapter, as the illustrations of the fin-de-si ecle resonate suggestively with Wallace’s butterflies. The final chapter engages with racial and gender standards and norms in Victorian fiction through
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Jillmarie Murphy, Attachment, Place, and Otherness in Nineteenth Century American Literature Literature & History Pub Date : 2021-05-01 Wen Yongchao
the important fact that this rising sensitivity towards animals notwithstanding, this was also the era in which the growing modern industrial use of animals was taking shape. In the last page of her book (p. 254) Spencer rightly notes that the Enlightenment, often blamed for disassociation with nature, was also the source of a movement towards fellowship with animals. No less significantly, however
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Jennifer Batt, Class, Patronage, and Poetry in Hanoverian England: Stephen Duck, the Famous Threshing Poet Literature & History Pub Date : 2021-05-01 Gary Lenhart
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Will Abberley, Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture: Nature, Science and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination Literature & History Pub Date : 2021-05-01 Elizabeth Chang
ries’ such as The Dorrington Deed-Box (1897) (p. 73). Ironically, the writers that replaced Doyle served only to cement his reputation as the master of the form. The Loveday Brooke stories were marketed by Hutchinson and Co. as ‘A Female Sherlock Holmes’, while the spiritual detective Flaxman Low was inevitably billed as ‘the Sherlock Holmes of the ghost world’ (pp. 44 and 133). Equally important to
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Alfred Thomas, The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture: Literature and Art in the Age of Chaucer and theGawainPoet Literature & History Pub Date : 2021-05-01 Candace Barrington
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Jane Spencer, Writing about Animals in the Age of Revolution Literature & History Pub Date : 2021-05-01 Nathaniel Wolloch
him as consistent aspirant to a life of study, moderation and self-discipline. Unlike many admirers of ‘The Thresher’s Labour’, she doesn’t condemn his late verse but does read it closely and notes the transformations in his station that it reflects. As for Batt’s own prose, it is a joy when a book of such intense scholarship is written in such graceful, felicitous sentences. One likes to think that
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Elizabeth Clarke and Robert W. Daniel (eds), People and Piety: Protestant Devotional Identities in Early Modern England Literature & History Pub Date : 2021-05-01 R. C. Richardson
drawbacks’ (p. 90). Identifying a similar set of characteristics in the Alliterative Morte Arthur – elements both insular and continental, celebrating a king’s mythic genealogy and critiquing that same king’s behaviour (including his imperial ambitions on the continent) – Thomas argues that the Alliterative Morte was not a direct product of the Ricardian court like Gawain but, rather, looked back at
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Clare Clarke, British Detective Fiction 1891–1901: The Successors to Sherlock Holmes Literature & History Pub Date : 2021-05-01 Harry Wood
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Alice Kelly, Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death, and the First World War Literature & History Pub Date : 2021-05-01 Elizabeth Wright
no-man’s-land billboard just outside New York’s city limits, is doubled with the real-life story of an image said to resemble the Virgin Mary that appeared on the walls of a Chicago underpass in 2005 and again in 2007. This gave rise to a play, ‘Our Lady of the Underpass’, staged in Chicago in 2009, and a cyber-afterlife for the apparition – the cue for Wasserman’s coda on ephemerality in digital media
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Megan L. Cook, The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635 Literature & History Pub Date : 2020-10-19 Rebeccah Hill
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Karen A. Weisman, Singing in a Foreign Land: Anglo-Jewish Poetry, 1812–1847 Literature & History Pub Date : 2020-10-19 Rochelle Sibley
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Myka Tucker-Abramson, Novel Shocks: Urban Renewal and the Origins of Neoliberalism Literature & History Pub Date : 2020-10-19 Joanna Freer
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Nadia Thérèse van Pelt, Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Playmakers and Their Strategies Literature & History Pub Date : 2020-10-19 Jamie Beckett
The preface to Nadia van Pelt’s new monograph recalls the author’s experience of attending street performances at the Festa Major in Sitges, Catalonia, which included folk dances, marauding devils, gegants (giants) and cabezudos (walking papier-mach e heads). Participating as a tourist, the author acknowledges that her experience of the festivities would necessarily have differed from other audience
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Regenia Gagnier, Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century Literature & History Pub Date : 2020-10-19 Ruth Livesey
themselves through their dialogue rather than needing to be mediated through a Christianised sense of Jewishness. While there seems little doubt that Aguilar embraces her estrangement from the English landscape and the English literary canon more assertively than the previous poets, Weisman stops short of suggesting a reason for this. It is perhaps notable that of the six writers discussed by Weisman
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Emily McGiffin, Of Land, Bones, and Money: Towards a South African Ecopoetics Literature & History Pub Date : 2020-10-19 Jane Poyner
ters from neoliberal power on the basis of ‘personal failing[s]’ (p. 102) are particularly insightful. The relationship between neoliberalism and race is again central to the book’s final chapter, on Plath’s The Bell Jar, where Tucker-Abramson suggests that Esther’s ultimately critical perspective on commodity culture and the city depends on the latter’s associationwith a foreignness viewed as threatening
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Christin Marie Taylor, Labor Pains: New Deal Fictions of Race, Work, and Sex in the South Literature & History Pub Date : 2020-10-19 Sinéad Moynihan
Vijaydan Detha’s ‘Untold Hitlers’ (1984); Alejo Carpentier’s Kingdom of this World (1949); Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) and others, to end with George Gissing on the hope of pessimism. Gagnier draws on the work of anthropologist Anna Tsing to figure the interaction between global universal and local particularism as friction. It is a great example of how Gagnier’s practice serves to challenge
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Samuel Fallon, Paper Monsters: Persona and Literary Culture in Elizabethan England Literature & History Pub Date : 2020-10-19 Anna Reynolds
than entertain that Chaucer’s devotional universe was fundamentally different from their own. While this book yields many ‘a monograph is not an endorsement’ disclaimers with respect to the literary merit of Chaucer, Cook recognises Chaucer’s views on fame as auspicious and eminently syllibine. While her antiquarians shoulder much of the credit for building his reputation, the spectre of this book
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Peasants and Partisans, Stranger Selves: Stuart Hood’s Memoir Project and Second World War Life Writing Literature & History Pub Date : 2020-10-19 Martin Stollery
This essay is the first detailed critical analysis of Pebbles from My Skull/Carlino (1963/1985), Stuart Hood’s account of the 1943/4 period he spent fighting as part of the Italian Resistance. It situates Hood’s work in relation to the prevailing ‘Colditz Myth’ associated with British Second World War prisoner of war escapees and the conceptions of England and Europe underlying this myth. It also considers
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Jules Vallès’s L’Insurgé and the Narrative of Popular Revolt Literature & History Pub Date : 2020-10-19 Biliana Kassabova
In this article, I look at Jules Vallès’s L’Insurgé to argue that its narrative style performs the politics of anonymity at the heart of the Paris Commune. To do this, I analyse three key elements of the novel – its autofictionality, its fragmentation and its ubiquitous present tense. By rejecting the exemplarity inherent in autobiography, this autofiction avant la lettre implies that the I of the
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‘Tale Engineering’: Agatha Christie and the Aftermath of the Second World War Literature & History Pub Date : 2020-10-19 Gill Plain
The ‘golden age’ of clue-puzzle detective fiction is usually considered to end in 1939 with the outbreak of the Second World War. Yet Agatha Christie, the most high-profile and successful exponent of the form, continued to produce bestselling novels until her death in 1976. This essay examines three novels from the immediate postwar period to consider how she adapted her writing to negotiate a changing
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Melodrama and the ‘art of government’: Jewish Emancipation and Elizabeth Polack’s Esther, the Royal Jewess; or The Death of Haman! Literature & History Pub Date : 2020-10-19 Jo Carruthers
This article challenges historians’ representations of working-class Jewish attitudes to emancipation in the early nineteenth century through a reading of Elizabeth Polack’s 1835 melodrama, Esther, the Royal Jewess, or the Death of Haman! Low expectations of working-class political engagement and the working-class genre of the melodrama are challenged by the astute political content of Polack’s play
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Editors’ Note Literature & History Pub Date : 2020-10-19 James Morland
The editors of Literature and History were deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Professor Richard Terry in July 2020. Professor Terry was an esteemed scholar of eighteenth-century literature who had served on the journal’s editorial advisory board since 2016. He numbered among his many acclaimed publications a landmark study of the mock-heroic genre, a fascinating history of eighteenth-century
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Marina MacKay, Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic Literature & History Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Matthew Risling
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Stephanie Elizabeth Churms, Romanticism and Popular Magic: Poetry and Cultures of the Occult in the 1790s Literature & History Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Orianne Smith
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Neil Rhodes, Common: The Development of Literary Culture in Sixteenth-Century England Literature & History Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Hannah Crawforth
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Mary Spongberg, Women Writers and the Nation’s Past 1790–1860: Empathetic Histories Literature & History Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Miriam Elizabeth Burstein
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Kirsten MacLeod, American Little Magazines of the Fin de Siècle: Art, Protest, and Cultural Transformation Literature & History Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Andrew Thacker
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‘Black Mail’: Networks of opium and postal exchange in nineteenth-century India Literature & History Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Devyani Gupta
This article discusses the overlap between British Indian networks of postal communication and trade, and smuggling of opium within a nineteenth-century inter-Asian context. These circulatory networks received support from the expansion of global shipping lines. The colonial state subsidised opium steamers of private shipping companies and converted them into mail packets, using them to transport illicit
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Gandhi, De Quincey and Hali: The pleasures and pains of opium Literature & History Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Javed Majeed
This essay explores Gandhi’s representations of opium as indicative of the addictive nature of the colonial relationship in India. It also shows how the opium trade had an impact on Gandhi’s redefinition of food. Some submissions to the 1893–94 Royal Commission on Opium in India refer to De Quincey and reading De Quincey’s Confessions alongside Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj and Guide to Health reveals how both
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Christina Lupton, Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century; Amit S. Yahav, Feeling Time: Duration, the Novel, and Eighteenth-Century Sensibility Literature & History Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Stuart Sherman
Renaissance in England for so long’ (p. 198). The importation of the novella into English (via intermediary texts such as Elyot’s The Governor (1531) and William Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure (1566)) opens up another dimension of the ‘common’, giving prominence to female characters and imagining women readers, Rhodes suggests. It also ‘helps us to understand the capacity of the common stage to offer
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Ezra Tawil, Literature, American Style: The Originality of Imitation in the Early Republic Literature & History Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Yvette Piggush
in time, and as a quality of time use’, into a reckoning of reading-time as a key to social justice (p. 156). As a ‘mode of experience’ (to echo Samuel Johnson), time in human life is never wholly homogenous or empty; it varies, from day to day, phase to phase, epoch to epoch, time to time. For cultural historians, then, the study of temporalities, emphatically plural, is scholarship’s proper vector
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Elizabeth M. Holt, Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel Literature & History Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Wen-chin Ouyang
suit these novel grazing lands, the refrigerated holds of ocean liners and the tastes of metropolitan meat-eaters. The fact that the British – ‘nothing if not gustatory chauvinists’ (p. 15) – were persuaded to move away from the ‘roast beef of Old England’, Woods shows, was caught up in the reality and rhetoric of the ‘native’ breeds that created a world after Britain’s meat-eating image. The Herds
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Peter John Brownlee, The Commerce of Vision: Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America Literature & History Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Susan S. Williams
caught up in the growing divide between ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ historians. Despite their often pioneering archival work (including in previously inaccessible French archives), the Stricklands’ affective approach to queens’ lives and ‘gothic sensibilities’ (p. 128) came in for growing derision as the years wore on, whereas Green’s development of calendaring and her editorial work situated her
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Mary Eagleton, Clever Girls and the Literature of Women’s Upward Mobility Literature & History Pub Date : 2019-09-14 Mary M. McGlynn
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Simone Murray, The Digital Literary Sphere: Reading, Writing, and Selling Books in the Internet Era Literature & History Pub Date : 2019-09-14 Sherman Young
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Adam Kirsch (ed), Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling Literature & History Pub Date : 2019-09-14 Jay Garcia
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Timothy Rosendale, Theology and Agency in Early Modern Literature Literature & History Pub Date : 2019-09-14 John West
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Cheryl A. Wall, On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay Literature & History Pub Date : 2019-09-14 Magdalena J. Zaborowska
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John Claborn, Civil Rights and the Environment in African-American Literature, 1895–1941 Literature & History Pub Date : 2019-09-14 Erin E. Forbes