New Books by Faculty in LLC
Esther Godfrey's The January-May Marriage in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, February 2009..jpg "Godfrey january book")
Abstract: Marriage between older husbands and younger wives was common in nineteenth-century literature, and as Godfrey skillfully argues, provides a useful window into the dynamics of the patriarchic paradigm. Examining canonical and non-canonical texts fromSense and Sensibility to Dracula, this study finds that literary January-May marriages respond to distinctively nineteenth-century anxieties regarding gender roles by deploying a surprising range of modes—parody, incest, aesthetics, horror, economics, and love. The January-May Marriage in Nineteenth-Century British Literature ultimately argues that age—like race, sexuality and class—is an essential component of gendered identities.
Cathy Canino's Shakespeare and the Nobility. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Abstract: Shakespeare and the Nobility examines, for the first time, how Shakespeare was influenced by the descendants of the aristocratic characters in his early history plays. The Henry VI trilogy and Richard III are among the first plays in the English dramaturgy that reflect the lives and activities of the ancestors of sixteenth-century aristocrats. In a time when the upper classes of England were obsessed with family lineage and reputation, the salient question is how William Shakespeare, a socially inferior playwright and actor, handled the delicate matter of portraying the complex and often unattractive ancestors of the most powerful people of his day. In answer to this question, this study examines the lives of the historical figures and their descendants, presenting fresh readings of the early histories, and argues that Shakespeare consistently modified his portrayal of the ancestors with their descendants in mind.
Peter Caster's Prisons, Race, and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Film. Ohio State University Press, January 2008. 
In Prisons, Race, and Masculinity, Peter Caster demonstrates the centrality of imprisonment in American culture, illustrating how incarceration, an institution inseparable from race, has shaped and continues to shape U.S. history and literature in the starkest expression of what W. E. B. DuBois famously termed “the problem of the color line.” A prison official in 1888 declared that it was the freeing of slaves that actually created prisons: “we had to establish means for their control. Hence came the penitentiary.” Such rampant racism contributed to the criminalization of black masculinity in the cultural imagination, shaping not only the identity of prisoners (collectively and individually) but also America’s national character. Caster analyzes the representations of imprisonment in books, films, and performances, alternating between history and fiction to describe how racism influenced imprisonment during the decline of lynching in the 1930s, the political radicalism in the late 1960s, and the unprecedented prison expansion through the 1980s and 1990s. Offering new interpretations of familiar works by William Faulkner, Eldridge Cleaver, and Norman Mailer, Caster also engages recent films such as American History X, The Hurricane, and The Farm: Life Inside Angola Prison alongside prison history chronicled in the transcripts of the American Correctional Association. This book offers a compelling account of how imprisonment has functioned as racial containment, a matter critical to U.S. history and literary study.
Thomas McConnell's A Picture Book of Hell and Other Landscapes. Texas Tech University Press, January 2005.
Imagine Chaucer’s pilgrims—without a Canterbury. Across a landscape devoid of monumental shrines, they would wander still, having no more alternative than the planet swimming in its system, just as they would continue to talk the stories of their lives. Such pilgrims are the characters inhabiting A Picture Book of Hell. In stories and situations that chime against one another like variations on musical themes, the quiet wanderers in this collection seem all entrained on the “pointless quest for the questless point,” as one narrator concludes. Two old friends repeatedly fail to rendezvous, save in the last connection of a suicide note. A reluctant bank teller abandons his life and his rented house to take the place of a dead vagabond. The volume’s title novella discloses a veteran of the First World War struggling to reconcile the two worlds he’s come to know too well, neither of which seems to fit his frame. From Ireland to the New South, whether exiled from home or homeland, from others or their own retreating selves, these characters rustle through their days rather like the series of small and vulnerable creatures that scurry and flee through the landscapes of these allusive and elliptical stories.