...Ben Leubner James Merrill: Life and Art , by Hammer Langdon , New York : Knopf , 2015 . 944 pages. How, then, as a biographer, even as a reader, to approach Merrill’s life and art? How to respond to a genuine invitation into an inner room the door to which is often either shut...

...Nell Wasserstrom Out of Character: Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic Life , by Moses Omri . Stanford : Stanford University Press , 2014 . 296 pages. Copyright © Hofstra University 2015 In Western cultural history, the concept of “character”—in both psychological and literary...

...Charles Andrews Life in the Writings of Storm Jameson: A Biography , by Maslen Elizabeth . Northwestern University Press , 2014 . 556 pages. Copyright © Hofstra University 2016 There are a few other flaws that inevitably appear in long works like Maslen’s. She is not above the...

..., Information, and the Management of Life The Emergence of Genetic Rationality: Space, Time, and Information in American Biological Science, 1870–1920 by Phillip Thurtle Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. 381 pages Justus Nieland Thurtle’s ambitious and far-ranging study seeks to...

... that greatly exceeds the philosophical limits of this formal iteration. Forming an arc through Eliot’s career, this perennial and developing engagement with scholarly citation belongs less to a single work than to the whole work of a life, and is thus less a matter of fact than, to borrow a phrase from...

...Timothy Parrish Philip Roth—Countertexts, Counterlives , by Shostak Debra , Columbia : University of South Carolina Press , 2004 . 332 pages. Copyright © Hofstra University 2006 You Must Change Your Life: Gender, Desire, and Philip Roth Philip Roth—Countertexts...

...Cara Lewis Copyright © Hofstra University 2014 Still Life in Motion: Mortal Form in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse Still Life in Motion: Mortal Form in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse Cara Lewis Late in the evening on March 28, 1918, a government car rolled to a stop at the bottom of a...

...Mollie Godfrey Abandoning the Black Hero: Sympathy and Privacy in the Postwar African American White-Life Novel , by Charles John , Rutgers University Press , 2012 . 280 pages. Copyright © Hofstra University 2014 Review Reviews “White-Life” Literature Reconsidered...

...Steven Belletto This essay focuses on the life and writing of African American novelist, playwright, and activist Julian Mayfield, whose under-studied work and extraordinary life tell a story about race and civil rights in literature that challenges familiar accounts. By analyzing Mayfield’s...

... vast distorted shadows of life,” this essay argues that such counterfactual narratives do not impose the world of the thriller onto Woolf; rather, they allegorize a spy-function already present in the writer’s life and work. From her participation in the 1910 Dreadnought Hoax, during which she and...

... life. In experimenting with a “nonanthropocentric anthropomorphism,” it is claimed that modernist ethics is founded on the attempt to respond to the demands, in both content and form, of “unrecognizable” creatures. Copyright © Hofstra University 2015 This content is made freely available by the...

... “things” have a life outside the realm of the human. Bowen’s fiction expresses an obvious need for objects to mean something or to represent the human, but her fiction also recognizes their inability to do so. In The Little Girls , this obsession with objects is coupled with the threat of extinction...

...Paul Bradley Bellew American modernist Hart Crane’s poem “The Idiot” details the poet’s real-life encounters with a young man with a cognitive disability. Beginning in 1926, Crane worked on the poem through different versions through letters, manuscripts, and magazine publications until about 1932...

... Bloom is at once a creature of multiple linguistic contingencies and a lone storyteller who longs to compose a coherent story of himself to make sense of his life, my argument traces Bloom’s internal ordeal through what Emmanuel Levinas might call his “narrative intentionality.” By following Levinasian...

...Heather Arvidson This essay traces a critique of anti-sentimentalist leftist impersonality in the critically underestimated and best-selling novel The Unpossessed (1934). Tess Slesinger’s satire parodies the deadened affect that results from programmatic refusals of subjectivity and personal life...

... relation of intellectual life to global political crisis was unavoidably at issue. Moore’s contribution to the proceedings, “Feeling and Precision,” proved a defining statement of her compositional principles. Situating Moore’s statement in relation to the inquiry Wahl set out to develop through the...

... anthropological, heritage—when she represents characters’ undeserved, uncompensated pains. Woolf’s thinking aligns her with Charles Darwin in the natural sciences. Like Darwin, Woolf makes tragic chance inseparable from the theater of life. This essay reads Woolf’s oft-cited rejection of teleological form and her...

... African fiction caravan trade ivory slaves Swahili coastal life Joseph Conrad postcolonial The thirty years between V. S. Naipaul’s first publication in 1957 and Zanzibar-born Abdulrazak Gurnah’s in 1987 spans at least three major epochs within the field of postcolonial studies: the era of...

...Alexandra Socarides Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life, and the Turning World , by Costello Bonnie , Ithaca : Cornell University Press , 2008 . 205 pages. © 2015 by Hofstra University 2009 Review Reviews Bringing History to the Table Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still...