Collection preserves books by current and former faculty and staff.
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Temporal Forms and the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean: Writing British Heritage in Ancient Lands
Lindsey Chappell
The Mediterranean is ubiquitous in nineteenth-century British literature, but this study is the first to fully recover and explore the region's centrality to Romantic and Victorian constructions of the past, the present, and the shape of time itself. Placing regions central to the making of Western cultural heritage, such as Italy and Greece, into context with one another and with European imperialism, Lindsey N. Chappell traces the contours of what she terms 'heritage discourse' – narrative that constructs or challenges imperial identities by reshaping antiquity – across nineteenth-century British texts. Heritage discourse functions via time, and often in counterintuitive and paradoxical ways. If assertions of political, cultural, and eventually racial supremacy were the end of this discourse, then time was the means through which it could be deployed and resisted. Chappell shows how historical narratives intervened in geopolitics, how antiquarianism sparked scientific innovation, and how classical and biblical heritage shaped British imperialism.
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The Anxiety Workbook
Christina Olson
Georgia southern faculty member, Christina Olson published The Anxiety Workbook.
The Anxiety Workbook explores contemporary anxiety, grief in its multitude of forms, and complicated familial dynamics via the lens of science and history while utilizing the language of therapy. These poems grapple with the ever-evolving collective and individual trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as seek answers and lessons from the natural world. The termination of a pregnancy, a distant father, the untimely death of a friend, our society’s obsession with Dateline and missing white girls, the estivation of the West African lungfish—The Anxiety Workbook covers these topics and much more in poems ranging from the hypernarrative to the highly lyrical, rich in voice and description.
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Journal of Second Language Writing: Special Issue on L2 Writing Assessment in the Digital Age
Jinrong Li and Mimi Li
The Special Issue on L2 Writing Assessment in the Digital Age was edited by Georgia Southern faculty member Jinrong Li and Mimi Li.
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Desegregation State: College Writing Programs after the Civil Rights Movement
Annie Mendenhall
A history of federal enforcement of higher education desegregation and its impact on writing programs. Focusing on University System of Georgia and two colleges, one a historically segregated white college and a historically Black college showing desegregation enforcement promoted and shaped writing programs by presenting literacy remediation and testing as critical to desegregation
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Assembling Critical Components: A Framework for Sustaining Technical and Professional Communication
Joanna Schreiber and Lisa Melonçon
How do you explain technical and professional communication? The field has long tried to answer this question, with limited success. Because the field is constantly evolving alongside social, technological, and communication changes, it remains difficult to explain. Assembling Critical Components presents TPC as a collective identity and provides a framework for situating critical components of the field. This collection includes chapters reflecting on topics such as accessibility, professional communication, regulatory writing, socio-technical situation, procedural knowledge, applied rhetoric, and ethics. These topics are contextualized by entries presenting field-wide data on topics including influential texts, key terms, and teaching practices over time. Assembling Critical Components provides students, teachers, researchers, program administrators, and industry professionals a tangible yet flexible approach to explaining TPC.
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Ecology, Spirituality, and Cosmology in Edwidge Danticat
Joyce White
Ecology, Spirituality, and Cosmology in Edwidge Danticat: Crossroads as Ritual examines employs nature, literary tradition, and the cosmogram to examine Danticat's fiction as textual sites imbued with ritual and conducive for healing and clarifying Africana diasporic consciousness.
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Perspectives on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: Nuanced Postnetwork Television
Amanda Konkle and Charles Burnetts
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 on themes of feminism, gender identity, and mental health, contributors explore the ways in which the show challenged viewer expectations, as well as the role television critics play in identifying a show’s “authenticity” or quality.
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The Bloomsbury Handbook to Octavia E. Butler
Gregory Jerome Hampton and Kendra R. Parker
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 Humanities and Disability Studies
· New discoveries from the Butler archives at the Huntington Library
The book includes a comprehensive bibliography of works by Butler and secondary scholarship on her work as well as an afterword by the novelist Tananarive Due. -
Deep River Blues
Tony R. Morris
When the body of a young girl washes up on the shores of the French Broad River, Cord McRae, newly elected sheriff of Acre County, Tennessee, suspects her death might be connected to the Glad Earth Farm, a commune just outside the small town of Falston. Guru/leader Levon Gladson and a group of a hundred and twenty-five followers have moved into an old farm that butts up to the Smokies, and Cord suspects they may be growing something more profitable than sorghum cane up in the hills. The mystery's complicated by Cord's investigation into a second recent murder, of an Afghan vet; the growing power of a local "hillbilly" mafia operated by the wily Thorn Reevers; and Cord's own marriage, which is teetering on the edge of divorce over past violence and his on-again, off-again love affair with liquor. With echoes of WINTER'S BONE and the novels of James Lee Burke, DEEP RIVER BLUES will be a worthwhile addition to the regional crime thriller genre.
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After Life as a Human
Laura Valeri
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 its interconnectedness to all living things. The seven essays in this collection braid local history, environmental research, and spiritual meditations to reflect on the island's wild beauty and the heartbreaking destruction of its fragile ecology.
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American Public Memory and the Holocaust: Performing Gender, Shifting Orientations
Lisa A. Costello
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 our orientations toward others. Using gender, performance, and rhetoric as a frame, Lisa Costello questions public memory as gender neutral while showing how new forms of memorialization like digital archives, YouTube posts, hybrid memoirs, and small films build emotional connections that bring us closer to the past.
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Some Kind of Mirror: Creating Marilyn Monroe
Amanda Konkle
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 with audiences precisely because it engaged with the era’s critical debates regarding femininity, sexuality, marriage, and political activism. Furthermore, she explores how Monroe drew from the techniques of Method acting and finely calibrated her performances to better mirror her audience’s anxieties and desires.
Drawing both from Monroe’s filmography and from 1950s fan magazines, newspaper reports, and archived film studio reports, Some Kind of Mirror considers how her star persona was coauthored by the actress, the Hollywood publicity machine, and the fans who adored her. It is about why 1950s America made Monroe a star, but it is also about how Marilyn defined an era. -
Fatal Errors; or Poor Mary-Anne: A Tale of the Last Century
Elizabeth Hays Lanfear, Tim Whelan, and Felicity James
In December 2015 a novel by Elizabeth Hays (c. 1765-1825) that has eluded scholars of women novelists of the 1790s for more than a century was finally discovered in the British Library. Fatal Errors was written in the late 1790s by the sister of Mary Hays, but not published until 1819 under her married name, Lanfear, and has therefore been completely overlooked until now. There has been considerable interest in the missing novel, since we know that Mary Wollstonecraft read and commented on a version of the manuscript in 1796, but it was presumed never to have been published. Now this missing piece of the conversation of the Hays-Wollstonecraft-Godwin circle has been located this modern critical edition of Fatal Errors contributes both to our knowledge of this network of radical writers and thinkers, and to our understanding of the trajectory of women’s fiction and the Jacobin novel.
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The Last Mastodon
Christina Olson
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
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 che rimane di se stessi nello specchio della natura incorrotta. Tra conchiglie rarissime, tartarughe marine, sciami di pellicani impettiti e sornioni, pesci guizzanti e coyote dall’ululato simile al grido della mitica strolaga, il ricordo del soggiorno sull’isola restituisce tutta la meraviglia di un paradiso perduto, che tuttavia non basta a far dimenticare la fragilità di un universo minacciato dalla criminale incoscienza della specie più forte e rapace.
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Chivalry in Westeros: The Knightly Code of A Song of Ice and Fire
Carol Parrish Jamison
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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Assessment Across Online Language Education
Stephanie Link and Jinrong Li
Georgia Southern faculty member Jinrong Li co-authored Assessment Across Online Language Education.
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The Dead Still Here
Laura E. Valeri
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 in their heads, Valeri includes a guide on how to take medication in “Prescription for Life,” which subtly points to the other hallucinatory narratives. This collection is at once provocative and lucid, and it offers various angles of characters looking for a relationship to hold.
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The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage
Jared Yates Sexton
"An impressionistic and often disturbing account of the 2016 presidential race . . . Sexton grapples with the Trump campaign from the perspective of the crowds reveling in the candidate's presence and message. It is a useful vantage point given the increasingly blatant bigotry in the months since the election . . . This book reveals the incremental nature of public displays of hatred, growing from harsh chants and bumper stickers to, say, an open and unmasked gathering of white supremacists in Charlottesville . . . His] dispatches are bracing." --The Washington Post
When he agreed to cover the 2016 election season, journalist Jared Yates Sexton didn't know he was stepping into what would become--for both political parties--the most rageful and divisive political circus in U.S. history.
His initial dispatches showed Democrats at war with their establishment, coming apart at the seams over the long-gestating ascendancy of Hillary Clinton and the upstart momentum of Bernie Sanders, whose grassroots campaign provoked uprisings of people desperate for change. Then, on June 14, Sexton attended a Donald Trump rally in Greensboro, North Carolina. One of the first journalists to witness these rallies and give mainstream readers an idea of the raw anger that occurred there, Sexton found himself in the center of a maelstrom. Following a series of tweets that saw his observations viewed well over 1 million times, his reporting was soon featured in The Washington Post, NPR, Bloomberg, and Mother Jones, and he would go on to write two pieces for The New York Times. Sexton gained more than 18,000 followers on Twitter in a matter of days, and received online harassments, campaigns to get him fired from his university professorship, and death threats that changed his life forever.
The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore is a firsthand account of the events that shaped the 2016 presidential election and the cultural forces that divided both parties and powered Donald Trump into the White House. Featuring in-the-field reports as well as deep analysis, Sexton's book is not just the story of the most unexpected and divisive election in modern political history. It is also a sobering chronicle of our democracy's political polarization--a result of our self-constructed, technologically assisted echo chambers.
Like the works of Hunter S. Thompson and Norman Mailer--books that have paved the way for important narratives that shape how we perceive not only the politics of our time but also our way of life--The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore is an instant classic, an authoritative depiction of a country struggling to make sense of itself.
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The Diary of Andrew Fuller, 1780-1801
Michael D. McMullen and Tim Whelan
This edition, with exhaustive identifications, notes, and valuable appendices for students of Baptist history, provides a fascinating glimpse into Fuller’s ministry at Soham and Kettering during a period (1780-1801) when he became the titular head of the Particular Baptists as a result of his preaching throughout Northamptonshire and surrounding counties; his writing, such as his influential work, The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation (1785); and his multi-national work as founding secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society (1792), a position he diligently maintained until his death in 1815, having left a legacy unequalled by any other minister of his generation.
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I Am the Oil of the Engine of the World
Jared Yates Sexton
Narcissism. Sexism. Consumerism and technological fetishism. The cult of media and the rot of war. In his third collection of stories, Jared Yates Sexton turns his eye to the ravages of the American Disease with twenty-five of his wildest and most experimental pieces. Told in raving mad prose fit for these savage times, Sexton skewers every sacred cow in an attempt to diagnose the sickness of Now.
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Bring Me The Head of Yorkie Goodman
Jared Yates Sexton
“Who’s Yorkie Goodman?” asks Wallace, an enforcer for an East Coast drug cartel. “Just a fella” says his boss, who goes by the name Boss. Just a fella … but Boss wants Yorkie Goodman taken out. He wants it so badly, he’ll risk sending Wallace into Wallace’s own past where a beautiful woman he abandoned years before still holds a bewitching power over him like some ancient siren song. He wants it so badly, he's sending along his deadliest assassin, Carp, to make sure the job is done right. And he wants proof … proof in the form of Goodman’s head delivered in a portable cooler. So begins Wallace’s twisted, violent odyssey into the American heartland - an odyssey that inevitably forces him to choose between love and gangland loyalty. Written in spare, gritty prose, Bring Me the Head of Yorkie Goodman takes you on a page-turning, Tarantinoesque ride to the end of the road.
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The Hook and The Haymaker
Jared Yates Sexton
In the follow-up to his critically lauded debut An End To All Things, Jared Yates Sexton presents twenty-three new stories that pick up where his first book left off. Whether they're set in a sweat-saturated sparring ring, the backroom of a gas station speakeasy, or in the kitchen of the house down the street, these are glimpses into an America that too-often goes unseen. Witness here the untold tales of the losers and the should've-beens, the dreamers and the hustlers, all of them just spoiling for their turn at glory or the inevitable one-two punch that puts them down for good.
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Safe in Your Head
Laura E. Valeri
Book Summary: A middle class Italian family finds reason to immigrate to America when Italy is threatened by the Red Brigades’ terrorist movement of the 1970s. The family patriarch manages a transfer to the United States, certain of better prospects and of a more secure future for his family, but each of the family members experiences a deeper kind of upheaval, negotiating personal losses and estrangement. A grandmother, a mother, and a granddaughter each discovers the many insidious ways in which war warps and defines life, even at a distance of decades.
