Spotlight
New Books by English Faculty
Department faculty are continually publishing important works of criticism, fiction, poetry, and essays. Below we are featuring three of these publications. In a few weeks, we’ll spotlight three different works.
Recent or Forthcoming Books by English Faculty
- Preaching the Converted
- The Vercelli Book is one of the oldest surviving collections of Old English homilies and poems, compiled in England in the tenth century. Preaching the Converted provides a sustained literary analysis of the book's prose homilies and demonstrates that they employ rhetorical techniques commonly associated with vernacular verse. The study argues that the dazzling textual complexity of these homilies rivals the most accomplished examples of Old English poetry. Highlighting the use of word play, verbal and structural repetition, elaborate catalogues, and figurative language, Samantha Zacher's study of the Vercelli Book fills a gap in the history of English preaching by foregrounding the significance of these prose homilies as an intermediary form. Also analyzing the Latin and vernacular sources behind the Vercelli texts to reveal the theological and formal interests informing the collection as a whole, Preaching the Converted is a rigorous examination of Old English homiletic rhetoric and poetics.
- October Crossing
- Poet, fiction writer, and biographer Robert Morgan continues his exploration and celebration of the culture and curiosities of his native Appalachia in his latest collection of poetry, October Crossing.
- Robert Morgan’s poems are always exciting for their precise knowledge of country things, and of how things go in the world of natural fact and process. This new collection gives us also some delightful lore from the Southern mountains: we learn of the horse fiddle, and holy cussing, and the intrepid pastor who held off bear or panther with his umbrella. -Richard Wilbur, Former US Poet Laureate
- Forty years after the publication of his first book, Robert Morgan makes this remarkable October Crossing. “Beating back the blackest shadows...to the pulse of clap and laughter,” he surely earns the collection’s final prospect: “years ahead / as golden as the leaves on hickories.” -Robert West
- Africana Thought
- Grant Farred edited the Summer 2009 issue of South Atlantic Quarterly. “Africana Thought” brings together scholars from a range of disciplines—including philosophy, anthropology, and literature—who are committed to thinking about the condition of contemporary black life.
- Founded amid controversy in 1901, the SAQ continues to cover the beat, center and fringe, with bold analyses of the current scene—national, cultural, intellectual—worldwide. This special issue presents essays by Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, Robert Bernasconi, Grant Farred, Joy James, Natalie Melas, V.Y. Mudimbe, Tejumola Olaniyan, Michael Ralph, and Paul C. Taylor, which move among Africa, the United States and the Caribbean, demonstrating the vibrancy and historical roots of Africana thought and philosophy.