The Ohio State University Press

O'Hara: Narrating Demons, Transformative Texts

2012-02-01T14:52:00.002-05:00

Narrating Demons, Transformative Texts

Rereading Genius in Mid-Century Modern Fictional Memoir

Daniel T. O’Hara

Narrating Demons, Transformative Texts: Rereading Genius in Mid-Century Modern Fictional Memoir, by Daniel T. O’Hara, acknowledges that the modern conception of literary genius is probably most lucidly expressed in the criticism of Lionel Trilling. But O’Hara also demonstrates that certain important and widely read mid-century modern fictional memoirs subversively return to an earlier conception that emphasizes the demonic nature of genius, a conception that is associated with the occult and the visionary and embraces the vision of evil articulated in earlier literature. O’Hara argues that Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947), Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959) all demonstrate an imagining of genius in art and in life that stands in stark and total opposition to the emerging post–World War II age of conformity. These influential works show that genius is inherently a dangerous reality, albeit a creative one. Despite its most transcendent appearances, the full immanence of this conception of demonic genius condemns the modern world to a Last Judgment that is every bit as severe as any envisioned in the Western religious traditions.

www.ohiostatepress.org

Fresco and Hedeman, eds.: Collections in Context

2012-02-01T14:44:00.003-05:00

Collections in Context

The Organization of Knowledge and Community in Europe

Edited by Karen Fresco and Anne D. Hedeman

The fourteen essays that comprise Collections in Context: The Organization of Knowledge and Community in Europe interrogate questions posed by French, Flemish, English, and Italian collections of all sorts—libraries as a whole, anthologies and miscellanies assembled within a single manuscript or printed book, and even illustrated ivory boxes.

Collecting became an increasingly important activity during the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries, when the decreased cost of producing books made ownership available to more people. But the act of collecting is never neutral: it gathers information, orders material (especially linear texts), and prioritizes everything—in short, collecting both organizes and comments on knowledge. Moreover, the context of a collection must reveal something about identity, but whose? That of the compiler? The reader or viewer? The donor? The patron?

With essays by a wide array of international scholars, Collections in Context demonstrates that the very act of collecting inevitably imposes some kind of relationship among what might otherwise be naively thought of as disparate elements and simultaneously exposes something about the community that created and used the collection. Thus, Collections in Context offers unusual insights into how collecting both produced knowledge and built community in early modern Europe.

www.ohiostatepress.org

Johnson: The Vitality of Allegory

2012-02-01T14:41:00.002-05:00

The Vitality of Allegory

Figural Narrative in Modern and Contemporary Fiction

Gary Johnson

In The Vitality of Allegory Gary Johnson argues that the rumors of allegory’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Surveying the broad landscape of modern and contemporary narrative fiction, including works from Europe, Africa, and North America, Johnson demonstrates that although wholly allegorical narratives have become relatively rare, allegory itself remains a vibrant presence in the ongoing life of the novel, a presence that can manifest itself in a variety of ways.

Working from the premise that conventional conceptions of allegory have been inadequate, Johnson takes a rhetorical approach, defining allegory as the transformation of some phenomenon into a figural narrative for some larger purpose. This reconception allows us to recognize that allegory can govern a whole narrative—and can do so strongly or weakly—or be an embedded part or a thematic subject of a narrative and that it can even be used ironically. By developing these theoretical points through careful and insightful analysis of works such as Jackson’s “The Lottery,” Orwell’s Animal Farm, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and The Trial, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Roth’s American Pastoral, Mann’s Death in Venice, Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, and several works by John Barth, Johnson himself transforms our understanding of allegory and of the history of the modern and contemporary novel.

www.ohiostatepress.org

Miller: A Criminal Power

2012-01-13T11:43:00.002-05:00

A Criminal Power

James Baldwin and the Law

D. Quentin Miller

James Baldwin, one of the major African American writers of the twentieth century, has been the subject of a substantial body of literary criticism. As a prolific and experimental author with a marginal perspective—a black man during segregation and the Civil Rights era, a homosexual at a time when tolerance toward gays was not common—Baldwin has fascinated readers for over half a century. Yet Baldwin’s critics have tended to separate his weighty, complex body of work and to examine it piecemeal. A Criminal Power: James Baldwin and the Law is the first thematic study to analyze the complete scope of his work. It accomplishes this through an expansive definition and thorough analysis of the social force that oppressed Baldwin throughout his life: namely, the law. Baldwin, who died in 1987, attempted suicide in 1949 at the age of 25 after spending eight days in a French prison following an absurd arrest for “receiving stolen goods”—a sheet that his acquaintance had taken from a hotel. This seemingly trite incident made Baldwin painfully aware of what he would later call the law’s “criminal power.”

Up to now, the only book-length studies to address Baldwin’s entire career have been biographies and artistic “portraits.” D. Quentin Miller corrects this oversight in a comprehensive volume that addresses and unifies all of Baldwin’s work. Miller asserts that the Baldwin corpus is a testament to how the abuse of power within the American legal, judicial, and penal systems manifested itself in the twentieth century.

The Ohio State University Press

O'Hara: Narrating Demons, Transformative Texts

Narrating Demons, Transformative Texts

Rereading Genius in Mid-Century Modern Fictional Memoir

Daniel T. O’Hara

Fresco and Hedeman, eds.: Collections in Context

Collections in Context

The Organization of Knowledge and Community in Europe

Edited by Karen Fresco and Anne D. Hedeman

Johnson: The Vitality of Allegory

The Vitality of Allegory

Figural Narrative in Modern and Contemporary Fiction

Gary Johnson

Miller: A Criminal Power

A Criminal Power

James Baldwin and the Law

D. Quentin Miller

Fruscione: Faulkner and Hemingway

Faulkner and Hemingway

Biography of a Literary Rivalry

Joseph Fruscione

Levine and Ortiz-Robles, eds.: Narrative Middles

Narrative Middles

Navigating the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

Edited by Caroline Levine and Mario Ortiz-Robles

Frakes: Jerusalem of Lithuania

Yerusholayim d’lite

Di yidishe kultur in der lite

Jerold C. Frakes

Hoeppner: Blood Prism

Blood Prism

Edward Haworth Hoeppner

Glass and Williams, eds.: Obscenity and the Limits of Liberalism

Obscenity and the Limits of Liberalism

Edited by Loren Glass and Charles Francis Williams

Mitchell: Victorian Lessons in Empathy and Difference

Victorian Lessons in Empathy and Difference

Rebecca N. Mitchell

Chandra: Dislocalism

Dislocalism

The Crisis of Globalization and the Remobilizing of Americanism

Sarika Chandra

Rader: Fact, Fiction, and Form

Fact, Fiction, and Form

Selected Essays

Ralph W. RaderEdited by James Phelan and David H. Richter

Bettini: The Ears of Hermes

The Ears of Hermes

Communication, Images, and Identity in the Classical World

Maurizio Bettini. Translated by William Michael Short.

Mortimer: For Love or for Money

For Love or for Money

Balzac’s Rhetorical Realism

Armine Kotin Mortimer

Goldberg: Mandelstam, Blok, and the Boundaries of Mythopoetic Symbolism

Mandelstam, Blok, and the Boundaries of Mythopoetic Symbolism

Stuart Goldberg

Kaufman: Understanding Tolstoy

Understanding Tolstoy

Andrew D. Kaufman

Sciarrino: Cato the Censor and the Beginnings of Latin Prose

Cato the Censor and the Beginnings of Latin Prose

From Poetic Translation to Elite Transcription

Enrica Sciarrino

Gayk and Tonry, eds.: Form and Reform

Form and Reform

Reading across the Fifteenth Century

Edited by Shannon Gayk and Kathleen Tonry

Egan: Oriental Shadows

Oriental Shadows

The Presence of the East in Early American Literature

Jim Egan

Steel: How to Make a Human

How to Make a Human

Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages

Karl Steel

Keirstead: Victorian Poetry, Europe, and the Challenge of Cosmopolitanism

Victorian Poetry, Europe, and the Challenge of Cosmopolitanism

Christopher M. Keirstead

Goerler: The Ohio State University

Ralph W. Rader
Edited by James Phelan and David H. Richter