Featured Publications
Five New Books
Five new books by our professorial faculty have appeared since the spring, and they give a good idea of the intellectual vitality and scholarly variety in our department.
Amy Billone’s Little Songs: Women, Silence, and the Nineteenth-Century Sonnet, which actually was published late last spring, explores the bond between lyric poetry and silence in women’s sonnets ranging from the late eighteenth-century works of writers like Charlotte Smith to Victorian texts by Elizabeth Barrett, Christina Rossetti, Isabella Southern, and other, lesser-known female poets. Although scholars acknowledge that women initiated the sonnet revival in England, Little Songs is the only major study of nineteenth-century female sonneteers.
Ilona Leki’s Undergraduates in a Second Language: Challenges and Complexities of Academic Literacy Development, a long-term case study of four undergraduate students whose first language was not English, was published by Laurence Erlbaum Associates. Aimed at teachers of writing, researchers in composition studies, and professionals in second-language studies, the book is the result of qualitative research and tells the stories of four students who were pursuing their higher education while working in a second language.
In a fascinating foray into postcolonial literature, Gichigiri Ndigirigi’s first book, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Drama and the Kamiriithu Popular Theater Experiment, has been published by Africa World Press. Ngugi is a Kenyan writer better known for his novels than his dramatic works, but at one point in his career he turned to popular theater and wrote in his native Gikuju rather than English in an attempt to create an activist theater. Gichingiri’s book explores both the aesthetics and the politics of the Kamiriithu theater.
Just out this summer is Volume 43 of Tennessee Studies in Literature, edited by Laura Howes. Titled Place, Space, and Landscape in Medieval Narrative, the collection contributes to the ongoing discussions about place and space in medieval culture. Laura also wrote the introduction to the volume; a distinguished group of medievalists, including our own Tom Heffernan, contributed essays.
Chuck Maland’s City Lights has been published by the British Film Institute in their Film Classics series. The film, which was just ranked #11 on the American Film Institute list of top American 100 films, was Chaplin’s first after sound came in. The book draws on Chaplin’s studio production records, housed at the Cineteca di Bologna, in Bologna, Italy, to trace the troubled production history of the film, a key transitional film in Chaplin’s body of work.