Happy birthday, Josefina!

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Valerie Tripp

When Tía Dolores, the beloved aunt who has cared for the Montoya family since the death of their mother, announces that she is planning to leave, Josefina and her sisters try to find a way to change her mind.

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Neil Robinson

Set in the Nova Scotian settlement at Waipu, Northland, in 1860. Set against a montage of bushmen working the virgin kauri forests of Northland, merchants and street-wise opportunists in the young town of Auckland, and sea-faring traders of goods, men and human souls in the tropical islands of New Caledonia and the New Hebrides. This is the story of young Donald McKinnon, on his rite of passage, attempting to question the methods and ideas of the minister, Norman McLeod. He struggles with the expectations and values of his Presbyterian community, as he learns to express his love for the 'beautiful and good' Jessie McKay.

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Angelique Richardson

"Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century recontextualizes New Woman writers, demonstrating that they were as concerned with the questions of poverty, sickness, and health as they were with the changing role of women, the issue for which they are currently generally known and celebrated. Focusing on fiction and the press, and drawing on the papers and published work of Galton and other eugenists, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century reveals the cultural pervasiveness of eugenics and explores, for the first time, the intimate relations between early feminism and eugenics, making a radical contribution to nineteenth-century studies."--Jacket.

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Gesa Stedman

"In this new study, Gesa Stedman mines the vein of emotion in Victorian writing to unearth new insights into the ways literature responded to the dramatic social and political changes then taking place." "Through an examination of the history of key Victorian emotion words, the major topics that dominate the discourses on emotions in this era, and the central fictional and non-fictional 'paradigm scenarios' which constitute these discourses, Stedman shows how slowly written representatives of the 'passions' change in the 19th century. She argues that in texts about feelings, Victorian authors seem to attempt to delay or halt on a discursive level what can no longer be stopped on any other level of their culture and society." "Reading fictional texts alongside non-fictional works, this study highlights the tensions between the need of 19th-century writers to control 'storms of passion' and their effects, and their need to express feelings. Contemporary research from various disciplines such as sociology, ethnology and history inform this study, which juxtaposes canonical material such as Dicken's Hard Times, Charlotte Bronte's Shirley and Germaine de Stael's Corinne with popular novels and non-fictional texts such as The Education of the Heart, by Sarah Ellis, and Darwin's The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals. The analysis deals with emotions applying to both genders, but includes a special section examining the representation of emotion in relation to women." "Stemming the Torrent provides new insights into the literature of the period, and brings to light important new material for the scholars interested in the philosophy and psychology of emotions."--Jacket.