About this Collection
The books archived in this Digital Commons@Georgia Southern collection are authored or edited by the faculty of the College of Arts and Humanities.
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Selected Papers of the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, 2020
Bryan A. Bank and Jeffrey D. Burson, Georgia Southern University
1-2021
Summary: This volume comprises selected papers delivered at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Consortium of the Revolutionary Era, 1750-1850, in convened in Tallahassee, Florida from 27-29 February 2020 under the sponsorship of the College of Arts and Sciences, and of the Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution, at Florida State University, with additional sponsorship by the Leon County Tourism Board and the Weider Family. All contributions published herein have undergone the peer-review process. The 2020 edition of the Selected Papers of the Consortium of the Revolutionary Era, 1750-1850 was produced as a collaboration between the Consortium’s Board of ... Read more
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Art as Information Ecology: Artworks, Artworlds, and Complex Systems Aesthetics
Jason Hoelscher, Georgia Southern University
10-2021
In Art as Information Ecology, Jason A. Hoelscher offers not only an information theory of art but an aesthetic theory of information. Applying close readings of the information theories of Claude Shannon and Gilbert Simondon to 1960s American art, Hoelscher proposes that art is information in its aesthetic or indeterminate mode—information oriented less toward answers and resolvability than toward questions, irresolvability, and sustained difference. These irresolvable differences, Hoelscher demonstrates, fuel the richness of aesthetic experience by which viewers glean new information and insight from each encounter with an artwork. In this way, art constitutes information that remains in formation---a difference ... Read more
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Perspectives on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: Nuanced Postnetwork Television
Amanda Konkle, Georgia Southern University and Charles Burnetts, University of Western Ontario
9-2021
With an off-putting title and a decidedly retrograde premise, the CW dramedy Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a surprising choice for critical analysis. But, loyal viewers quickly came to appreciate the show’s sharp cultural critique through masterful parody, and this strategy has made it a critical darling and earned it several awards throughout its run. In ways not often seen on traditional network television, the show transcends conventional genre boundaries—the Hollywood musical, the romantic comedy, the music video—while resisting stereotypes associated with contemporary life.
The essays in this collection underscore the show’s ability to distinguish itself within the current television market. Focusing ... Read more
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Broadcast Announcing Worktext
Mary E. Beadle, John Carroll University; Reed Smith, Georgia Southern University; and Alan R. Stephenson, John Carroll University
5-14-2020
Broadcast Announcing Worktext, now in its fifth edition, remains one of the best resources for those looking to gain the skills, techniques, and procedures necessary to enter the competitive field of broadcast performance.
Written accessibly, with easy-to-digest modules and practice projects, this book encourages active participation from readers to help develop their talent on air. In addition to the principles of good performance, the book addresses the importance of the audience and how to communicate effectively to diverse groups. The book combines traditional teaching with practical experience, and includes sample scripts and self-study exercises to allow for a practical, hands-on ... Read more
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Sources for Europe in the Modern World with Guided Writing Exercises
Allison Scardino Belzer, Georgia Southern University and Jonathan S. Perry, University of South Florida
7-2020
Georgia Southern faculty member Allison Scardino Belzer co-edited Sources for Europe in the Modern World with Guided Writing Exercises.
Extensively revised by new coeditor Allison Scardino Belzer, Sources for Europe in the Modern World with Guided Writing Exercises, Second Edition, includes more than 100 primary sources. Expertly edited for clarity and pedagogical utility, the sources range from letters, political tracts, memoirs, and fiction to essays, speeches, poems, legal documents, and visuals. Each document is accompanied by a headnote and reading questions. The second edition features fifty-two new and expanded sources and now includes images. Guided writing exercises, derived from the ... Read more
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The Bloomsbury Handbook to Octavia E. Butler
Gregory Jerome Hampton and Kendra R. Parker, Georgia Southern University
2-20-2020
Octavia E. Butler is widely recognized today as one of the most important figures in contemporary science fiction. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars and covering Butler's complete works from the bestselling novel Kindred, to her short stories and major novel sequences Patternmaster, Xenogenesis and The Parables, this is the most comprehensive Companion to Butler scholarship available today.
The Bloomsbury Handbook to Octavia E. Butler covers the full range of contemporary scholarly themes and approaches to the author's work, including:
· Cyborgs and the posthuman
· Race and African American history
· Afrofuturism
· Gender and sexuality
· New perspectives from Religious Studies, the Environmental ... Read more -
Old Southern Cookery: Mary Randolph's Recipes from America's First Regional Cookbook Adapted for Today's Kitchen
Christopher E. Hendricks, Georgia Southern University and Sue J. Hendricks
5-1-2020
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The Yudahua Business Group in China's Early Industrialization
Juan Juan Peng, Georgia Southern University
3-4-2020
By tracing the history of Yudahua from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, this study analyzes a successful inland business model among textile companies in modern China. The steady growth of this enterprise relied primarily on its strategy to focus on low-end markets and to locate new mills in underdeveloped interior regions. This strategy further allowed the enterprise to pioneer industrialization in its host localities, demonstrating a major social and economic impact on the local societies. At the same time, Yudahua’s unique team leadership pattern—five leading families shared its ownership and management—made the business an ... Read more
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After Life as a Human
Laura Valeri, Georgia Southern University
11-1-2020
Located off of Florida's Forgotten Coast, Dog Island is a wild twin of St. George Island, a popular resort destination. Unlike St. George, however, Dog Island hosts less than 100 residents and a large nature preserve. Accessible only by boat or airplane, the island's pristine state attracts those who seek reprieve from the noise of modern life and those drawn to an ancient paradise untouched by commercial enterprises. Yet, with sea-level rising, industrial spills poisoning the wildlife, and climate change increasing the frequency of hurricanes, Dog Island is swiftly becoming a paradise lost, another casualty of humanity's reluctance to acknowledge ... Read more
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The Culture of Enlightening: Abbé Claude Yvon and the Entangled Emergence of the Enlightenment
Jeffrey D. Burson, Georgia Southern University
5-2019
Recent scholarly and popular attempts to define the Enlightenment, account for its diversity, and evaluate its historical significance suffer from a surprising lack of consensus at a time when the social and political challenges of today cry out for a more comprehensive and serviceable understanding of its importance. This book argues that regnant notions of the Enlightenment, the Radical Enlightenment, and the multitude of regional and religious enlightenments proposed by scholars all share an entangled intellectual genealogy rooted in a broader revolutionary "culture of enlightening" that took shape over the long-arc of intellectual history from the waning of the sixteenth-century ... Read more
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Volume 6 ( 2019): Issue 3 (Aug 2019): The Culture of Jesuit Erudition in an Age of Enlightenment
Jeffrey D. Burson, Georgia Southern University
2019
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The Skeptical Enlightenment: Doubt and Certainty in the Age of Reason
Jeffrey D. Burson, Georgia Southern University and Anton M. Matytsin, Kenyon College
5-1-2019
Although many historical narratives often describe the eighteenth century as an unalloyed 'Age of Reason', Enlightenment thinkers continued to grapple with the challenges posed by the revival and spread of philosophical skepticism. The imperative to overcome doubt and uncertainty informed some of the most innovative characteristics of eighteenth-century intellectual culture, including not only debates about epistemology and metaphysics but also matters of jurisprudence, theology, history, moral philosophy, and politics. Thinkers of this period debated about, established, and productively worked for progress within the parameters of the increasingly circumscribed boundaries of human reason. No longer considered innate and consistently perfect, reason ... Read more
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American Public Memory and the Holocaust: Performing Gender, Shifting Orientations
Lisa A. Costello, Georgia Southern University
10-2019
The recent rise of global antisemitism, Holocaust denial, and American white nationalism has created a dangerous challenge to Holocaust public memory on an unprecedented scale. This book is a timely exploration of the ways in which next-generation Holocaust survivors combine old and new media to bring newer generations of audiences into active engagement with Holocaust histories. Readers have been socialized to expect memorialization artifacts about the Holocaust to come in the form of diaries, memoirs, photos, or documentaries in which gender is often absent or marginalized. This book shows a complex process of remembering the past that can positively shift ... Read more
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Savannah's Midnight Hour: Boosterism, Growth, and Commerce in a Nineteenth-Century American City
Lisa L. Denmark, Georgia Southern University
2019
Savannah's Midnight Hour argues that Savannah's development is best understood within the larger history of municipal finance, public policy, and judicial readjustment in an urbanizing nation. In providing such context, Lisa Denmark adds constructive complexity to the conventional Old South/New South dichotomous narrative, in which the politics of slavery, secession, Civil War, and Reconstruction dominate the analysis of economic development. Denmark shows us that Savannah's fiscal experience in the antebellum and postbellum years, while exhibiting some distinctively southern characteristics, also echoes a larger national experience. Her broad account of municipal decision making about improvement investment throughout the nineteenth century offers ... Read more
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Some Kind of Mirror: Creating Marilyn Monroe
Amanda Konkle, Georgia Southern University
2-4-2019
Book Summary:
Although she remains one of the all-time most recognizable Hollywood icons, Marilyn Monroe has seldom been ranked among the greatest actors of her generation. Critics have typically viewed her film roles as mere extensions of her sexpot star persona. Yet this ignores both the subtle variations between these roles and the acting skill that went into the creation of Monroe’s public persona.
Some Kind of Mirror offers the first extended scholarly analysis of Marilyn Monroe’s film performances, examining how they united the contradictory discourses about women’s roles in 1950s America. Amanda Konkle suggests that Monroe’s star persona resonated ... Read more -
The Last Mastodon
Christina Olson, Georgia Southern University
2019
In summer of 2017, Christina Olson was invited to serve as poet-in-residence for apaleontology conference and exhibition (“The Valley of the Mastodons”) at the Western Science Center in Hemet, California. These poems, exploring the nature of history, assembly, and ownership, were inspired by that time spent among the paleontologists as well as Olson’s observations of the museum’s collections of fossils, particularly Max the Mastodon.
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L’Isola del Silenzio
Laura Valeri, Georgia Southern University
2019
Non occorre spostarsi troppo per viaggiare molto. Sette miglia, appena, nelle acque verdeazzurre del Golfo del Messico, a bordo di un traghetto che fa la spola tra il villaggio costiero di Carrabelle e la sottile striscia di terra di Dog Island. In questo lembo quasi intatto della Florida meridionale, battuto da ricorrenti uragani, privo di negozi, refrattario a connessioni internet e abitato da un centinaio di coraggiosi residenti, approdano una scrittrice americana di antica stirpe mediterranea e il suo compagno fotografo. È il contesto ideale per lasciarsi alle spalle l’esasperato efficientismo del Sogno Americano e ascoltare il silenzio, scoprendo quel ... Read more
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A History of the Muslim World Since 1260
Vernon O. Egger, Georgia Southern University
2018
A History of the Muslim World since 1260 continues the narrative begun by A History of the Muslim World to 1750 by tracing the development of Muslim societies, institutions, and doctrines from the time of the Mongol conquests through to the present day. It offers students a balanced coverage of Muslim societies that extend from Western Europe to Southeast Asia. Whereas it presents a multifaceted examination of Muslim cultures, it focuses on analysing the interaction between the expression of faith and contemporary social conditions.
This extensively updated second edition is now in full colour, and the chronology of the book ... Read more
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Chivalry in Westeros: The Knightly Code of A Song of Ice and Fire
Carol Parrish Jamison, Georgia Southern University
2018
George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire has sparked a renewed interest in things medieval. The pseudo-historical world of Westeros delights casual fans while offering a rich new perspective for medievalists and scholars. This study explores how Martin crafts a chivalric code that intersects with and illuminates well known medieval texts, including both romance and heroic epics. Through characters such as Brienne of Tarth, Sandor Clegane and Jaime Lannister, Martin variously challenges, upholds and deconstructs chivalry as depicted in the literature of the Middle Ages.
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Memory in a Time of Prose: Studies in Epistemology, Hebrew Scribalism, and the Biblical Past
Daniel Pioske, Georgia Southern University
9-2018
Memory in a Time of Prose investigates a deceptively straightforward question: what did the biblical scribes know about times previous to their own? To address this question, the following study focuses on matters pertaining to epistemology, or the sources, limits, and conditions of knowing that would have shaped biblical stories told about a past that preceded the composition of these writings by a generation or more. The investigation that unfolds with these interests in mind consists of a series of case studies that compare biblical references to an early Iron Age world (ca. 1175–830 BCE) with a wider constellation ... Read more
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Three Dashes Bitters
Jack Simmons, Georgia Southern University
7-13-2018
When Tim Schmidt returns to New Orleans to attend his sister’s debutante ball, he finds that nothing has changed during his three-year hiatus in Boston.
He is still in love with Jane, a hard-drinking iconoclast, too well bred to join the ranks of the Generation X slackers, yet unable to accept the standards of her high society upbringing. Happily, it seems Jane might still harbor feelings for him.
But over drinks at The Columns Hotel, things get messy, and Tim’s grand return to the city of his birth soon unravels—the very sort of thing that inspired Tim to leave NOLA ... Read more
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The Dead Still Here
Laura E. Valeri, Georgia Southern University
6-5-2018
Book Summary: Mapping stories set in Europe and America, The Dead Still Here skillfully paces through eleven short stories about friends-with-benefits typed relationships, vicious divorces and thievery, the loss of a child, the loss of a mother, and the Coast Guard and the Navy rescuing refugees from a bad storm at sea. Laura Valeri writes one single breathtaking sentence about sex, Dear John emails, and Christmas presents in “Liabilities of a Love Misguided” and displays a sharp sense of paranoia based on everyone looking at the narrator, laughing, whispering in “What They Know.” Along with characters that are irrevocably locked ... Read more
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From Rome to Zurich, from Ignatius to Vermigli: Essays in Honor of John Patrick Donnelly, S.J.
Kathleen M. Comerford, Georgia Southern University; Gary W. Jenkins, Eastern University; and Torrance Kirby, McGill University
2-20-2017
Book Summary: From Rome to Zurich, between Ignatius and Vermigli brings notable scholars from the fields of Reformation and Early Modern studies to honor their friend, mentor, and colleague, John Patrick Donnelly with essays commensurate with his own broad interests and scholarship. Touching Protestant scholasticism, Reformation era life writing, Reformation polemics – both Protestant and Catholic – and with several on theology proper, inter alia, the essays collected here by a group of international scholars break new ground in Reformation history, thought, and theology, providing fresh insights into current scholarship in both Reformation and Catholic Reformation studies. The essays take ... Read more
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Raising Our Voices, Communicating Our Existence
Elizabeth Desnoyers-Colas, Georgia Southern University
5-25-2017
Book Summary: Raising Our Voices provides complete and thorough coverage of the study and practice of public speaking, the seventh edition offers students theory and practical skills, presenting public speaking as an art form for transactional communication between speaker and audience.
The goal of this text is to make it one that will prepare students to become effective public speakers in any of the various speaking situations they may encounter in their lives. Whether they are presenting in a professional capacity, speaking as a community leader, offering a tribute to a retiring colleague, eulogizing a friend, delivering a commencement address, ... Read more
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A History of the Muslim World to 1750: The Making of a Civilization
Vernon O. Egger, Georgia Southern University
2017
A History of the Muslim World to 1750 traces the development of Islamic civilization from the career of the Prophet Muhammad to the mid-eighteenth century. Encompassing a wide range of significant events within the period, its coverage includes the creation of the Dar al-Islam (the territory ruled by Muslims), the fragmentation of society into various religious and political groups including the Shi'ites and Sunnis, the series of catastrophes in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that threatened to destroy the civilization, and the rise of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires.
Including the latest research from the last ten years, this ... Read more
