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Aldo Leopold's Odyssey
Rediscovering the Author of A Sand County Almanac
Julianne Lutz Newton
Island Press, 2008
A household icon of the environmental movement, Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) may be the most quoted conservationist in history. A Sand County Almanac has sold millions of copies and Leopold's writings are venerated for their perceptions about land and how people might live in concert with the whole community of life.

But who is the man behind the words? How did he arrive at his profound and poetic insights, inspiring generations of environmentalists? Building on past scholarship and a fresh study of Leopold's unpublished archival materials, Julianne Lutz Newton retraces the intellectual journey generated by such passion and intelligence.

Aldo Leopold's Odyssey illuminates his lifelong quest for answers to a fundamental issue: how can people live prosperously on the land and keep it healthy, too? Leopold's journey took him from Iowa to Yale to the Southwest to Wisconsin, with fascinating stops along the way to probe the causes of early land settlement failures, contribute to the emerging science of ecology, and craft a new vision for land use.

More than a biography, this articulate volume is a guide to one man's intellectual growth, and an inspirational resource for anyone pondering the relationships between people and the land.
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Aldo Leopold's Odyssey, Tenth Anniversary Edition
Rediscovering the Author of A Sand County Almanac
Julianne Lutz Warren
Island Press, 2016
In 2006, Julianne Lutz Warren (née Newton) asked readers to rediscover one of history’s most renowned conservationists. Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey was hailed by The New York Times as a “biography of ideas,” making “us feel the loss of what might have followed A Sand County Almanac by showing us in authoritative detail what led up to it.” Warren’s astute narrative quickly became an essential part of the Leopold canon, introducing new readers to the father of wildlife ecology and offering a fresh perspective to even the most seasoned scholars.

A decade later, as our very concept of wilderness is changing, Warren frames Leopold’s work in the context of the Anthropocene. With a new preface and foreword by Bill McKibben, the book underscores the ever-growing importance of Leopold’s ideas in an increasingly human-dominated landscape.

Drawing on unpublished archives, Warren traces Leopold’s quest to define and preserve land health. Leopold's journey took him from Iowa to Yale to the Southwest to Wisconsin, with fascinating stops along the way to probe the causes of early land settlement failures, contribute to the emerging science of ecology, and craft a new vision for land use.

Leopold’s life was dedicated to one fundamental dilemma: how can people live prosperously on the land and keep it healthy, too? For anyone compelled by this question, the Tenth Anniversary Edition of Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey offers insight and inspiration. 
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Artist as Author
Action and Intent in Late-Modernist American Painting
Christa Noel Robbins
University of Chicago Press, 2021
With Artist as Author, Christa Noel Robbins provides the first extended study of authorship in mid-20th century abstract painting in the US. Taking a close look at this influential period of art history, Robbins describes how artists and critics used the medium of painting to advance their own claims about the role that they believed authorship should play in dictating the value, significance, and social impact of the art object. Robbins tracks the subject across two definitive periods: the “New York School” as it was consolidated in the 1950s and “Post Painterly Abstraction” in the 1960s. Through many deep dives into key artist archives, Robbins brings to the page the minds and voices of painters Arshile Gorky, Jack Tworkov, Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, Sam Gilliam, and Agnes Martin along with those of critics such as Harold Rosenberg and Rosalind Krauss. While these are all important characters in the polemical histories of American modernism, this is the first time they are placed together in a single study and treated with equal measure, as peers participating in the shared late modernist moment.
 
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The Author and His Publisher
Lectures Delivered in Mainz and Austin
Siegfried Unseld
University of Chicago Press, 1980
As head of Suhrkamp Verlag, a premier German publishing house, Siegfried Unseld is eminently qualified to write about the relationship between authors and their publishers—and he does so here with engaging partisan enthusiasm. Long familiar with what he terms the Janus-headed nature of the publishing profession, Unseld considers the dual responsibilities of a publisher: in one direction, his responsibility for the material success of his firm; and in the other, his responsibility to the intellectual ideals and spiritual requirements of his authors.

Through close examination of four writers, Unseld shows how the author's personality can affect the publisher's dilemma. Hermann Hesse, by virtue of his loyalty and his desire for financial independence, enjoyed an exemplary relationship with his publishers. With Bertolt Brecht it was all confusion; with Rainer Maria Rilke, a one-author-one-publisher lifetime alliance; with Swiss poet Robert Walser, a mire of difficulties ("Each book printed," he once said, was "a grave for its author").
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The Author as Hero
Self and Tradition in Bulgakov, Pasternak, and Nabokov
Justin Weir
Northwestern University Press, 2011
Justin Weir develops a persuasive analysis of the complex relationship between authorial self-reflection and literary tradition in three of the most famous Russian novels of the first half of the twentieth century: Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, and Nabokov's The Gift. With Weir's innovative interpretation, and its compelling historical, cultural, and theoretical insights, The Author as Hero offers a new view of an important moment in the evolution of Russian literature.
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The Author of the Prometheus Bound
By C. J. Herington
University of Texas Press, 1970

The Prometheus Bound has proved to be both the most problematic and the most influential of extant Greek tragedies. Especially during the past two hundred years the character here created has transcended the boundaries of nationality, ideology, and race: Goethe, Shelley, Marx, and—to judge by other published translations—modern Russia and China have in turn been fascinated by this being who is tortured by the gods for furthering the progress of humanity. Yet the interpretation of the play itself and its relation to the group of now-lost plays with which it was originally produced continue to arouse violent controversy. At the center of the controversy stand the questions, raised with increasing urgency during the twentieth century, whether the play is by Aeschylus at all and when it was written.

This monograph attempts a systematic answer to these questions. It first surveys the general conditions of the authenticity problem as they appeared after the redating of Aeschylus’ Supplices. Next, it catalogues in detail the stylistic, metrical, and thematic features of the Prometheus that have been supposed to tell against Aeschylus’ authorship. Finally, it suggests that these phenomena will not make sense on the assumption that the play was written by anyone other than Aeschylus, and that the date of composition must fall after the Oresteia, in the last two years of Aeschylus’ life. Given this definite context and date, many of the apparent problems of the Prometheus Bound either fall away or at least can be more precisely formulated by reference to the other extant tragedies of Aeschylus’ latest phase.

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Boston’s Immigrants, 1790–1880
A Study in Acculturation, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, With a New Preface by the Author
Oscar Handlin
Harvard University Press, 1991
As fresh today as when it was first published a half-century ago, Boston’s Immigrants illuminates the history of a particular city and an important phase of the American experience. Focusing on the life of people from the perspective of the social historian, the book explores a wide range of subjects: peasant society and the cause of European migration, population growth and industrial development, the ideology of progress and Catholic thought, and urban politics and the dynamic of prejudice. A generation of students and scholars has profited from its insights, and general readers have enjoyed its lively style. A new Preface by the author reflects upon the book’s intellectual origins.
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Boston’s Immigrants, 1790–1880
A Study in Acculturation, Revised and Enlarged Edition, With a New Preface by the Author
Oscar Handlin
Harvard University Press, 1979
As fresh in 1991 as when it first published a half-century ago, Boston's Immigrants illuminates the history of a particular city and an important phase of the American experience. Focusing on the life of people from the perspective of the social historian, the book explores a wide range of subjects: peasants society and the cause of European migration, population growth and industrial development, the ideology of progress and Catholic thought, and urban politics and the dynamic of prejudice. A generation of students and scholars has profited from its insights, and general readers have enjoyed its lively style. A new preface by the author reflects upon the book's intellectual origins.
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David Cronenberg
Author or Filmmaker?
Mark Browning
Intellect Books, 2007
For more than thirty years, David Cronenberg has made independent films such as Scanners and A History of Violence which aim to disturb, surprise, and challenge audiences. He has also repeatedly drawn on literary fiction for inspiration, adapting themes from authors like William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, and Patrick McGrath for the big screen; David Cronenberg: Author or Filmmaker? is the first book to explore how underground and mainstream fiction have influenced—and can help illuminate—his labyrinthine films.

Film scholar Mark Browning examines Cronenberg’s literary aesthetic not only in relation to his films’ obvious source material, but by comparing his movies to the writings of Vladimir Nabokov, Angela Carter, and Bret Easton Ellis. This groundbreaking volume addresses Cronenberg’s narrative structures and his unique conception of auteurism, as well as his films’ shocking psychological frameworks, all in the broader context of film adaptation studies. David Cronenberg is an essential read for anyone interested in the symbiotic relationship between literature and filmmaking.
 
David Cronenberg is a work that attempts to illuminate and unravel the connection between the great Canadian auteur and his literary influences.”—Film Snob Weekly
 
 “David Cronenberg is an essential read for anyone interested in the symbiotic relationship between literature and filmmaking.”—Video Canada
 

 
 
 
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The Deaths of the Author
Reading and Writing in Time
Jane Gallop
Duke University Press, 2011
For thirty years the "death of the author" has been a familiar poststructuralist slogan in literary theory, widely understood and much debated as a dismissal of the author, a declaration of the writer's irrelevance to the readers experience. In this concise book, Jane Gallop revitalizes this hackneyed concept by considering not only the abstract theoretical death of the author but also the writer's literal death, as well as other authorial "deaths" such as obsolescence. Through bravura close readings of the influential literary theorists Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, she shows that the death of the author is best understood as a relation to temporality, not only for the reader but especially for the writer. Gallop does not just approach the death of the author from the reader's perspective; she also reflects at length on how impending death haunts the writer. By connecting an author's theoretical, literal, and metaphoric deaths, she enables us to take a fuller measure of the moving and unsettling effects of the deaths of the author on readers and writers, and on reading and writing.
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Dostoevsky and The Idiot
Author, Narrator, and Reader
Robin Feuer Miller
Harvard University Press, 1981

The Idiot is perhaps the most difficult and surely most enigmatic of Dostoevsky’s novels. In it the novelist developed a narrator-chronicler who uses an intricate web of alternately truthful and deceptive words to create a narrative of baffling intricacy. The reader is confronted with moral and ethical problems and is forced to make his or her own decisions about the import of what has occurred.

Robin Miller analyzes the varied narrative modes and voices, as well as the inserted narratives, and examines the effects of all these on the reader. She has derived helpful insights from current writing about the phenomenology of reading by such critics as Wayne Booth, Wolfgang Iser, and Stanley Fish. She draws extensively on Dostoevsky’s letters, notebooks, and journalistic writings in describing his ideas about his readers and about the craft of fiction. These writings also provide clues to the importance of Rousseau’s Confessions and the Gothic novels for the development of Dostoevsky’s narrative techniques. The notebooks, moreover, are an indispensable source of information concerning the genesis of The Idiot and the radical changes it underwent in the course of its composition.

Although the book is primarily a close reading of The Idiot, it throws light on the later novels, The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov, in which Dostoevsky again makes use of a fictional narrator.

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Facing It
AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author
Ross Chambers
University of Michigan Press, 2001
For a generation or more, literary theorists have used the metaphor of "the death of the author" in considering the observation that to write is to abdicate control over the meanings one's text is capable of generating. But in the case of AIDS diaries, the metaphor can be literal. Facing It examines the genre not in classificatory terms but pragmatically, as the site of a social interaction. Through a detailed study of three such diaries, originating respectively in France, the United States, and Australia, Ross Chambers demonstrates that issues concerning the politics of AIDS writing and the ethics of reading are linked by a common concern with the problematics of survivorhood. Two of the diaries chosen for special attention in this light are video diaries: La Pudeur ou l'impudeur by Hervé Guibert (author of To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life), and Silverlake Life, by the American videomaker Tom Joslin (aided by his lover and friends, notably Peter Friedman). The third is a defiant but anxious text, Unbecoming, by an American anthropologist, Eric Michaels, who died in Brisbane, Australia, in 1988. Other authors more briefly examined include Pascal de Duve, Bertrand Duquénelle, Alain Emmanuel Dreuilhe, David Wojnarowicz, Gary Fisher, and the filmmaker (not a diarist) Laurie Lynd. Finally, Facing It takes on the issue of its own relevance, asking what contributions literary criticism can make in the midst of an epidemic.
"Groundbreaking in its approach and potentially wide in its appeal. . . . The rigor of the ideas, their dramatic nature, and the political drive of the rhetoric all should win Facing It a large readership that could extend far beyond students of narrative or queer theory." --David Bergman, Towson University, editor of Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality
Ross Chambers is Distinguished University Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan, and author of Room for Maneuver: Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative and Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction.
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Facing It
AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author
Ross Chambers
University of Michigan Press, 1999
For a generation or more, literary theorists have used the metaphor of "the death of the author" in considering the observation that to write is to abdicate control over the meanings one's text is capable of generating. But in the case of AIDS diaries, the metaphor can be literal. Facing It examines the genre not in classificatory terms but pragmatically, as the site of a social interaction. Through a detailed study of three such diaries, originating respectively in France, the United States, and Australia, Ross Chambers demonstrates that issues concerning the politics of AIDS writing and the ethics of reading are linked by a common concern with the problematics of survivorhood. Two of the diaries chosen for special attention in this light are video diaries: La Pudeur ou l'impudeur by Hervé Guibert (author of To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life), and Silverlake Life, by the American videomaker Tom Joslin (aided by his lover and friends, notably Peter Friedman). The third is a defiant but anxious text, Unbecoming, by an American anthropologist, Eric Michaels, who died in Brisbane, Australia, in 1988. Other authors more briefly examined include Pascal de Duve, Bertrand Duquénelle, Alain Emmanuel Dreuilhe, David Wojnarowicz, Gary Fisher, and the filmmaker (not a diarist) Laurie Lynd. Finally, Facing It takes on the issue of its own relevance, asking what contributions literary criticism can make in the midst of an epidemic.
"Groundbreaking in its approach and potentially wide in its appeal. . . . The rigor of the ideas, their dramatic nature, and the political drive of the rhetoric all should win Facing It a large readership that could extend far beyond students of narrative or queer theory." --David Bergman, Towson University, editor of Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality
Ross Chambers is Distinguished University Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan, and author of Room for Maneuver: Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative and Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction.
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Fanfiction and the Author
How FanFic Changes Popular Cultural Texts
Judith May Fathallah
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
The production, reception and discussion of fanfiction is a major aspect of contemporary global media. Thus far, however, the genre has been subject to relatively little rigorous qualitative or quantitative study-a problem that Judith M. Fathallah remedies here through close analysis of fanfiction related to Sherlock, Supernatural, and Game of Thrones. Her large-scale study of the sites, reception, and fan rejections of fanfic demonstrate how the genre works to legitimate itself through traditional notions of authorship, even as it deconstructs the author figure and contests traditional discourses of authority. Through a process she identifies as the 'legitimation paradox', Fathallah demonstrates how fanfic hooks into and modifies the discourse of authority, and so opens new spaces for writing that challenges the authority of media professionals.
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Getting at the Author
Reimagining Books and Reading in the Age of American Realism
Barbara Hochman
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009
Throughout the nineteenth century, American readers and reviewers assumed that a book revealed its author's individuality, that the experience of reading was a kind of conversation with the writer. Yet as Barbara Hochman shows in this illuminating study, the emergence of literary realism at the turn of the century called such assumptions into question. The realist aesthetic of narrative "objectivity" challenged the notion that a literary text reflects its author's personality.

But reading practices were slow to change; many resisted the effort to reconceptualize the relationship among writers, readers, and books. Even the most consistent advocates of "impartial" narration found it difficult to imagine a book without an author or to dissociate the experience of reading from the idea of a reciprocal human transaction.

In analyzing the battle over realism and the gradual shift in conventional reading practices, Hochman draws on a rich array of sources, including popular works, advertisements, and letters. She combines traditional modes of literary inquiry with methods adapted from the new historicism, cultural studies, and book history. By elucidating the realists' ambivalence about their own aesthetic criteria, she shows how a late nineteenth century conflict about reading practices reflected pressing tensions in American culture, and how that conflict shaped criteria of literary value for most of the twentieth century.
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Ibsen’s Drama
Author to Audience
Einar Haugen
University of Minnesota Press, 1979

Ibsen's Drama was first published in 1979. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

"A dramatist for all seasons" Einar Haugen calls Henrik Ibsen in this series of lectures given in honor of the 150th anniversary of the Norwegian playwright's birth. Using a modified version of the communications model developed by linguist Roman Jakobson, Haugen provides a readable, succinct analysis of Ibsen's thinking and dramaturgy. He examines the ways in which Ibsen the author communicated with his nineteenth-century audience and is able, still, to move and inform playgoers today.

Haugen brings to this work a lifetime of familiarity with Ibsen in Norwegian and in translation, and he draws upon his own experience as a theatergoer and as an observer of student and audience reaction to the plays. Ibsen's Drama will bring pleasure and a deeper understanding of the playwright to students and playgoers alike.

Einar Haugen is Victor S. Thomas Professor of Scandinavian and Linguistics, emeritus, at Harvard University. He is author, editor, or translator of many books and articles in linguistics, literature, and immigrant history, notably The Norwegian Language in America (1953), The Scandinavian Languages (1976), and Land of the Free (1978).

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Language Learnability and Language Development
With New Commentary by the Author
Steven Pinker
Harvard University Press, 1996
In this influential study, Steven Pinker develops a new approach to the problem of language learning. Now reprinted with new commentary by the author, this classic work continues to be an indispensable resource in developmental psycholinguistics.
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Mind and World
With a New Introduction by the Author
John McDowell
Harvard University Press, 1996

Modern philosophy finds it difficult to give a satisfactory picture of the place of minds in the world. In Mind and World, based on the 1991 John Locke Lectures, one of the most distinguished philosophers writing today offers his diagnosis of this difficulty and points to a cure. In doing so, he delivers the most complete and ambitious statement to date of his own views, a statement that no one concerned with the future of philosophy can afford to ignore.

John McDowell amply illustrates a major problem of modern philosophy—the insidious persistence of dualism—in his discussion of empirical thought. Much as we would like to conceive empirical thought as rationally grounded in experience, pitfalls await anyone who tries to articulate this position, and McDowell exposes these traps by exploiting the work of contemporary philosophers from Wilfrid Sellars to Donald Davidson. These difficulties, he contends, reflect an understandable—but surmountable—failure to see how we might integrate what Sellars calls the “logical space of reasons” into the natural world. What underlies this impasse is a conception of nature that has certain attractions for the modern age, a conception that McDowell proposes to put aside, thus circumventing these philosophical difficulties. By returning to a pre-modern conception of nature but retaining the intellectual advance of modernity that has mistakenly been viewed as dislodging it, he makes room for a fully satisfying conception of experience as a rational openness to independent reality. This approach also overcomes other obstacles that impede a generally satisfying understanding of how we are placed in the world.

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Odyssey of a Wandering Mind
The Strange Tale of Sara Mayfield, Author
Jennifer Horne
University of Alabama Press, 2024
A carefully rendered portrait of a brilliant but troubled daughter of the Old South who struggled against the conventions of gender, class, family, and ultimately of sanity, yet survived to define a creative life of her own
 
Sara Mayfield was born into Alabama’s governing elite in 1905 and grew up in a social circle that included Zelda Sayre, Sara Haardt, and Tallulah and Eugenia Bankhead. After winning a Goucher College short story contest judged by H. L. Mencken, Mayfield became friends with Mencken and his circle, then visited with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and hobnobbed with the literati while traveling in Europe after a failed marriage. Returning to Alabama during the Depression, she briefly managed the family landholdings before departing for New York City where she became involved in the theater. Inventing a plastic compound while working on theatrical sets, she applied for a patent and set her sights on a livelihood as an inventor and businesswoman. With the advent of World War II, Mayfield returned to her family home in Tuscaloosa where she expanded her experiments, freelanced as a journalist, and doggedly pursued a bizarre series of military and intelligence schemes, prompting temporary hospitalization. In 1945, she mingled with a host of cultural figures, including Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, and even a young John F. Kennedy, while reporting on the creation of the United Nations from Mexico and California. Back in Tuscaloosa after the war, however, she struggled to find her way with both work and family, becoming increasingly paranoid about perceived conspiracies arrayed against her. Finally, her mother and brother committed her to Bryce Hospital for the Insane, where she remained for the next seventeen years.

Throughout her life, Mayfield kept journals, wrote fiction, and produced thousands of letters while nursing the ambition that had driven her since childhood: to write and publish books. During her confinement, Mayfield assiduously recorded her experiences and her determined efforts—sometimes delusional, always savvy—to overturn her diagnosis and return to the world as a sane, independent adult. At 59, she was released from Bryce and later obtained a decree of “having been restored to sanity,” enabling her to manage her own financial affairs and to live how and where she pleased. She went on to publish noteworthy literary biographies of the Menckens and the Fitzgeralds plus a novel based on the life of Mona Lisa, finally achieving her quest to become the author of books and her own life. In Odyssey of a Wandering Mind, noted writer Jennifer Horne draws on years of research and an intimate understanding of the vast archive Sara Mayfield left behind to sensitively render Mayfield’s struggle to move through the world as the person she was—and her ultimate success in surviving to define the terms of her story.
 
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The Physicists
The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America, With a New Preface by the Author
Daniel J. Kevles
Harvard University Press, 1995

This magnificent account of the coming of age of physics in America has been heralded as the best introduction to the history of science in the United States. Unsurpassed in its breadth and literary style, Daniel J. Kevles’s account portrays the brilliant scientists who became a powerful force in bringing the world into a revolutionary new era. The book ranges widely as it links these exciting developments to the social, cultural, and political changes that occurred from the post–Civil War years to the present. Throughout, Kevles keeps his eye on the central question of how an avowedly elitist enterprise grew and prospered in a democratic culture.

In this new edition, the author has brought the story up-to-date by providing an extensive, authoritative, and colorful account of the Superconducting Super Collider, from its origins in the international competition and intellectual needs of high-energy particle physics, through its establishment as a multibillion-dollar project, to its termination, in 1993, as a result of angry opposition within the American physics community and Congress.

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Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China
Militarization and Social Structure, 1796–1864, With a New Preface by the Author
Philip A. Kuhn
Harvard University Press, 1970

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Reclaiming the Author
Figures and Fictions from Spanish America
Lucille Kerr
Duke University Press, 1992
The recent fiction of Spanish America has been widely acclaimed for its experimental and revolutionary qualities. In Reclaiming the Author, Lucille Kerr studies the sources of power of this newly emergent literature in her detailed examination of the critical concept of "the author." Kerr considers how Spanish American narratives raise questions about authorial identity and activity through the different figures of the author they propose. These author-figures, she maintains, both complement and contradict notions of authority that exist outside of the world of fiction.
By focusing on works by well-known Spanish American authors—Cortazar, Donoso, Fuentes, Poniatowska, Puig, and Vargas Llosa—Kerr shows how the Spanish Americans have formed a radical poetics of the author. Her readings demonstrate how exemplary Spanish American texts, such as Rayuela, Terra nostra, and El hablador, call into question the author as a unitary or uniform, and therefore unproblematical, figure. Individually and together, Kerr's readings reclaim "the author" as a complex critical concept encompassing diverse, conflicting, even competitive roles.
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Regional Advantage
Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128, With a New Preface by the Author
AnnaLee Saxenian
Harvard University Press, 1996
Why is it that in the ’90s, business in California’s Silicon Valley flourished, while along Route 128 in Massachusetts it declined? The answer, Annalee Saxenian suggests, has to do with the fact that despite similar histories and technologies, Silicon Valley developed a decentralized but cooperative industrial system while Route 128 came to be dominated by independent, self-sufficient corporations. The result of more than one hundred interviews, this compelling analysis highlights the importance of local sources of competitive advantage in a volatile world economy.
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Re-reading Poets
The Life of the Author
Paul Kameen
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010

In Re-reading Poets, Paul Kameen offers a deep reflection on the importance of poets and poetry to the reader. Through his historical, philosophical, scholarly, and personal commentary on select poems, Kameen reveals how these works have helped him form a personal connection to each individual poet. He relates their profound impact not only on his own life spent reading, teaching, and writing poetry, but also their potential to influence the lives of readers at every level.


In an examination of works by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walt Whitman, and others, Kameen seeks to sense each author’s way of seeing, so that author and reader may meet in a middle ground outside of their own entities where life and art merge in deeply intimate ways. Kameen counters ideologies such as New Criticism and poststructuralism that marginalize the author, and instead focuses on the author as a vital presence in the interpretive process. He analyzes how readers look to the past via “tradition,” conceptualizing history in ways that pre-process texts and make it difficult to connect directly to authors. In this vein, Kameen employs examples from T. S. Eliot, Martin Heidegger, and Mikhail Bakhtin.


Kameen examines how people become poets and how that relates to the process of actually writing poems. He tells of his own evolution as a poet and argues for poetry as a means to an end beyond the poetic, rather than an end in itself. In Re-reading Poets, Kameen’s goal is not to create a new dictum for teaching poetry, but rather to extend poetry’s appeal to an audience far beyond academic walls. 
 

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Rousseau as Author
Consecrating One's Life to the Truth
Christopher Kelly
University of Chicago Press, 2002
For Rousseau, "consecrating one's life to the truth" (his personal credo) meant publicly taking responsibility for what one publishes and only publishing what would be of public benefit. Christopher Kelly argues that this commitment is central to understanding the relationship between Rousseau's writings and his political philosophy.
Unlike many other writers of his day, Rousseau refused to publish anonymously, even though he risked persecution for his writings. But Rousseau felt that authors must be self-restrained, as well as bold, and must carefully consider the potential political effects of what they might publish: sometimes seeking the good conflicts with writing the truth. Kelly shows how this understanding of public authorship played a crucial role in Rousseau's conception—and practice—of citizenship and political action.

Rousseau as Author will be a groundbreaking book not just for Rousseau scholars, but for anyone studying Enlightenment ideas about authorship and responsibility.
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Samuel Johnson
The Life of an Author
Lawrence Lipking
Harvard University Press, 1998

He was a servant to the public, a writer for hire. He was a hero, an author adding to the glory of his nation. But can a writer be both hack and hero? The career of Samuel Johnson, recounted here by Lawrence Lipking, proves that the two can be one. And it further proves, in its enduring interest for readers, that academic fashions today may be a bit hasty in pronouncing the "death of the author."

A book about the life of an author, about how an author is made, not born, Lipking's Samuel Johnson is the story of the man as he lived--and lives--in his work. Tracing Johnson's rocky climb from anonymity to fame, in the course of which he came to stand for both the greatness of English literature and the good sense of the common reader, the book shows how this life transformed the very nature of authorship.

Beginning with the defiant letter to Chesterfield that made Johnson a celebrity, Samuel Johnson offers fresh readings of all the writer's major works, viewed through the lens of two ongoing preoccupations: the urge to do great deeds--and the sense that bold expectations are doomed to disappointment. Johnson steers between the twin perils of ambition and despondency. Mounting a challenge to the emerging industry that glorified and capitalized on Shakespeare, he stresses instead the playwright's power to cure the illusions of everyday life. All Johnson's works reveal his extraordinary sympathy with ordinary people. In his groundbreaking Dictionary, in his poems and essays, and in The Lives of the English Poets, we see Johnson becoming the key figure in the culture of literacy that reaches from his day to our own.

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Sophisticated Rebels
The Political Culture of European Dissent, 1968–1987, With a New Preface by the Author
H. Stuart Hughes
Harvard University Press, 1988

Those who think otherwise, though they may fail, deserve our attention, says H. Stuart Hughes. In Sophisticated Rebels, Hughes shows what happened to the revolutionary spirit after the 1968 suppressions in Prague and Paris: dissenters learned their lesson and began to pursue their goals in patient, realistic, limited fashion, eschewing violence and inflammatory ideological rhetoric. Yet theirs were the voices protesting what even conformists recognize as social evils; the manipulative routine of bureaucratic authority, public and private; the soullessness of life in the sprawling conurbations European cities have become; the deadening of sensibility that allows us to screen out from consciousness the possibility of nuclear war.

Hughes takes up in turn the innovations in dissidence during a reactionary age: the foreign workers, especially Moslems, who flooded the more prosperous countries of Europe in the 1970s, creating a large underclass; the advocates of local cultural autonomy, such as the Welsh and Bretons; the independent-minded theologians Hans Küng and Edward Schillebeeckx and Leonardo Boff arrayed against Pope John Paul II, who was himself rebelling against a dilution of Catholic theology; Poland’s Solidarity and with it the longing for reunification of a sundered continent; the frustration of Soviet dissent, from the hope of Khrushchev’s “thaw” to the sufferings of Sakharov; the collapse of Eurocommunism and the falterings of democratic socialism; and the slow advance of the German Greens toward a society on a human scale. Although European dissent, with the exception of the Greens, has failed to shake the hold of conservative rule, Hughes believes the subject matter of dissent—notably the protest against the nuclear menace—has lost none of its timeliness for the century ahead, and the dissenters themselves face the future with both stoicism and hope.

Serving as markers throughout the route are brief analyses of the relevance of novelists and social critics, among them Milan Kundera, Adam Michnik, Yuri Trifonov, Roy Medvedev, and Jürgen Habermas.

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front cover of The Strategy of Conflict
The Strategy of Conflict
With a New Preface by the Author
Thomas C. Schelling
Harvard University Press, 1981
A series of closely interrelated essays on game theory, this book deals with an area in which progress has been least satisfactory—the situations where there is a common interest as well as conflict between adversaries: negotiations, war and threats of war, criminal deterrence, extortion, tacit bargaining. It proposes enlightening similarities between, for instance, maneuvering in limited war and in a traffic jam; deterring the Russians and one’s own children; the modern strategy of terror and the ancient institution of hostages.
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A Theory of Price Control
With a New Introduction by the Author
John Kenneth Galbraith
Harvard University Press, 1952
Galbraith supplies the underlying economic ideas that will help readers understand how particular controls affect general operation of the economy. He shows why price controls during World War II worked as well as they did and analyzes the criteria for effective price control both under a fully mobilized economy and under limited mobilization.
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front cover of Varieties of Police Behavior
Varieties of Police Behavior
The Management of Law and Order in Eight Communities, With a New Preface by the Author
James Q. Wilson
Harvard University Press, 1968

The patrolman has the most difficult, complex, and least understood task in the police department. Much less is known of him than of his better publicized colleague, the detective. In this important and timely book, James Q. Wilson describes the patrolman and the problems he faces that arise out of constraints imposed by law, politics, public opinion, and the expectations of superiors.

The study considers how the uniformed officer in eight communities deals with such common offenses as assault, theft, drunkenness, vice, traffic, and disorderly conduct. Six of the communities are in New York State: Albany, Amsterdam, Brighton, Nassau County, Newburgh, and Syracuse. The others are Highland Park, Illinois, and Oakland, California.

Enforcing laws dealing with common offenses is especially difficult because it raises the question of administrative discretion. Murder, in the eyes of the police, is unambiguously wrong, and murderers are accordingly arrested; but in cases such as street-corner scuffles or speeding motorists, the patrolman must decide whether to intervene (should the scuffle be stopped? should the motorist be pulled over?) and, if he does, just how to intervene (by arrest? a warning? an interrogation?). In most large organizations, the lowest-ranking members perform the more routinized tasks and the means of accomplishing these tasks are decided by superiors, but in a police department the lowest-ranking officer—the patrolman—is almost solely responsible for enforcing those laws which are the least precise, the most ambiguous. Three ways or “styles” of policing—the watchman, the legalistic, and the service styles—are analyzed and their relation to local politics is explored.

In the final chapter, Mr. Wilson discusses if and how the patrolman’s behavior can be changed and examines some current proposals for reorganizing police departments. He observes that the ability of the patrolman to do his job well may determine our success in managing social conflict and our prospects for maintaining a proper balance between liberty and order.

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front cover of William Wells Brown
William Wells Brown
Author and Reformer
William Edward Farrison
University of Chicago Press, 1969


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