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Literary Criticism


Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel

Eric Hayot

Rights: World
For more info, contact Mary Bisbee-Beek at bisbeeb@umich.edu

Popular images of China in Western culture date back as far as the publication of Marco Polo's memoirs in the early fourteenth century. But China exercised a particularly profound influence on the avant-garde in the twentieth century. The American poet Ezra Pound, the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, and the writers associated with the Parisian avant-garde literary journal Tel Quel developed especially strong passions for China. Eric Hayot examines these writers' infatuation with China, demonstrating that Pound, Brecht, and the writers of Tel Quel looked east and found a new vision for both themselves and the West.

China touched both Pound's poetry and Brecht's theater, and led Telquelian Julia Kristeva to write, looking back on her 1974 trip to China, that the world is "made up of incommensurable isolations." The intricacies of the relationship between various written "Chinas" —as texts—and the nation/culture known simply as "China"—their context—are profoundly complex; Hayot's book embraces a unique form of scholarship that gives those intricacies a voice.

As it traces the presence of these different "Chinas" through the work of these writers, Chinese Dreams explores the effect of the West's use of China or Chinese ideas as a way of opening up new ways of reading, writing, and thinking, and calls into question the very means of representing otherness in the history of the West. Chinese Dreams ultimately asks if it might be possible to attend to the political meaning of imagining the other, while still enjoying the pleasures and possibilities of such dreaming.

Eric Hayot is Assistant Professor of English, the University of Arizona.

December 2004
240 pages

German Orientalisms

Todd Kontje

Rights: World
For more info, contact Mary Bisbee-Beek at bisbeeb@umich.edu

In its wide historical sweep, German Orientalisms offers important new insight into many of the most famous writers in the German language, from Goethe to Thomas Mann to Günter Grass. Building on Edward Said's Orientalism—which defined Orientalism as a form of Western knowledge directly linked to imperial power—author Todd Kontje offers a more nuanced version as seen through the lens of German literature of the last 1,500 years.

Said focused on British and French Orientalists, as these two nations had colonial interests in the East; Germany was different in that it had no stake in the Orient. Far from diminishing an Orientalist perspective, however, the absence of a German empire contributed to a peculiarly German brand of Orientalism, one in which German writers alternated between identification with the rest of Europe and allying themselves with parts of the East against the West.

Above all, writes Kontje, "how did German writers conceive of their place in the 'land of the center' (das Land der Mitte) and how did their literary works help to create the imagined community of the German nation?"

Todd Kontje is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California San Diego.

April 2004
328 pages


Henry James at Work

Lyall Powers and Theodora Bosanquet

Rights: World
For more info, contact Mary Bisbee-Beek at bisbeeb@umich.edu

Henry James at Work is a delightful memoir by Theodora Bosanquet, who was secretary to Henry James from 1907 until his death in 1916. This slim volume, which was originally published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press in 1924, recounts the history of Bosanquet's association with James, and provides an engaging commentary on James's process of writing and revision, his milieu, preferences and attitudes.

This new edition rescues Bosanquet from the shadows of literary history and shows her to be a fascinating figure in her own right, a skilled editor, an early feminist, and contemporary of the Bloomsbury literary community. This new and annotated edition of Bosanquet's original Henry James at Work is enhanced by a biographical essay about Bosanquet and her circle, and excerpts from her diaries and letters, now in the Harvard University archives.

At the time of her hiring by Henry James in 1907, Theodora Bosanquet was 27 and James, 64. The well-educated and dedicated Bosanquet quickly became indispensable to James. In addition to the memoir Henry James at Work, she published two other books, critical studies on Harriet Martineau and on Paul Valéry. Following James's death she became Executive Secretary of the International Federation of University Women.

January 2007
152 pages


Make Us Wave Back: Essays on Poetry and Influence

Michael Collier

Rights: World
For more info, contact Mary Bisbee-Beek at bisbeeb@umich.edu

In Make Us Wave Back, National Book Critic's Circle Award finalist Michael Collier explores the influences that have made him one of the most distinguished poets of his generation. Beyond the development of his own literary voice, he is also interested in examining his preoccupations with the language of poetry and its traditions.

Make Us Wave Back includes essays on an expansive list of subjects, among them the literary correspondence of William Maxwell; the meaning of the author's own role as poet laureate of the state of Maryland; the journals of Louise Bogan, and how they reveal Bogan's struggle with her own personal fears as well as the reconstruction of herself as a writer; and many more.

Michael Collier is Professor of English and Codirector of the creative writing program at the University of Maryland. He is also director of the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference. He is the author of several books of poems, including The Clasp and Other Poems, The Folded Heart, and The Ledge.

September 2007
176 Pages


The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath

Anita Helle

Rights: World
For more info, contact Mary Bisbee-Beek at bisbeeb@umich.edu

Fascination with the late poet Sylvia Plath (1932-63) has never waned in the four decades since her suicide, but in recent years there has been a resurgence of critical and popular interest in her life and work. The Unraveling Archive is the first gathering of new critical perspectives on Plath in more than fifteen years, providing essays by leading critics and emerging scholars that reflect the new terrain of critical work and textual scholarship on Plath over the last two decades. The volume features a remarkable gallery of photos and paintings, some of them never before in print, along with contributions by Tracy Brain, Robin Peel, Kathleen Connors, Kate Moses, Sandra Gilbert, Ann Keniston, Janet Badia, Marsha Bryant, Lynda K. Bundtzen, and Diane Wood Middlebrook.

Sylvia Plath has been only partially understood until now because the posthumous record was incomplete—and altered by Ted Hughes. The Unraveling Archive is the first to reflect recent discoveries and publications that have instigated a broad critical reassessment of Plath's life and work.

Anita Helle is Associate Professor of English at Oregon State University.

January 2007
312 pages


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