Twentieth century interpretations of the Odyssey
Howard W. Clarke
Essays discuss Homer's epic poem, examines its motifs, setting, and characters, and offers an assessment of its place in literature.

by Jeanne Rosier Smith (1997)
Writing Tricksters examines the remarkable resurgence of tricksters - ubiquitous shape-shifters who dwell on borders, at crossroads, and between worlds - on the contemporary cultural and literary scene. Depicting a chaotic, multilingual world of colliding and overlapping cultures, many of America's most successful and important women writers are writing tricksters. Taking up works by Maxine Hong Kingston, Louise Erdrich, and Toni Morrison, Jeanne Rosier Smith accessibly weaves together current critical discourses on marginality, ethnicity, feminism, and folklore, illuminating a "trickster aesthetic" central to non-Western storytelling traditions and powerfully informing American literature today. Publisher's description.
Howard W. Clarke
Essays discuss Homer's epic poem, examines its motifs, setting, and characters, and offers an assessment of its place in literature.
Chris Anderson
"Taking the position that style has value in its own right, that language forms a major component of the story that a nonfiction writer has to tell, [Chris] Anderson anaylzes the work of America's foremost practioners of New Journalism -- Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Joan Didion."--Jacket.
Frederick Moehn
Brazilian popular music is widely celebrated for its inventive amalgams of styles and sounds. Cariocas, native residents of Rio de Janeiro, think of their city as particularly conducive to musical mixture. Contemporary Carioca introduces a generation of Rio-based musicians who collaboratively have reinvigorated Brazilian genres, such as samba and maracatu, through juxtaposition with international influences, including rock, techno, and funk. He describes how these artists manage their careers, having reclaimed some control from record labels. Examining the specific meanings that their fusions have in the Carioca scene, he explains that musical mixture is not only intertwined with nationalist discourses of miscegenation, but also with the experience of being middle-class in a country confronting neoliberal models of globalization. Moehn offers vivid depictions of Rio musicians as they creatively combine and reconcile local realities with global trends and exigencies.
Christopher Fox and Brenda Tooley
Walking Naboth's Vineyard brings together nine prominent scholars to present new and valuable perspectives on the work of Jonathan Swift. In recent years Swift has been increasingly reconsidered and recast as a distinctly Irish writer, and there is little doubt that his artistic career was shaped by Ireland's troubled political life. Literary critics and scholars, as well as scholars of Irish literature, will find this collection unique in that it explores Swift's life and writing in a distinctively Irish context and considers how Swift was influenced as a member of a population that was divided against itself, colonized by a neighboring kingdom, and politically and culturally marginalized. These essays demonstrate how, despite Swift's ambivalence about his Irish nationality, he found Ireland's worldly position a close parallel to his own complex position in the political and cultural worlds in which he lived.