Bücher veröffentlicht von Ohio State University Press

Nine inhabitants of a sleepy Irish seaside town tell what they know about a visitor from out of town who is rumored to be both attractive and dangerous. A young mother in an affluent Long Island community finds herself strangely drawn to the woman she has hired as her housekeeper. After her small business venture fails, a woman is forced to move back in with her parents and discovers they aren''t the couple she thought they were at all. In fourteen expertly crafted stories, Wendy Rawlings chronicles with comic sympathy what happens when American women and Irish men, parents and children, employers and employees, hurtle toward each other and crash headlong into cultural or generational roadblocks. Like the American in the title story, who can imagine only a "litter of claddagh rings and Erin go bragh, the high-stepping of Riverdance on videocassette" until she gets on a plane and goes to Ireland, Rawlings''s fiction entreats us to toss out the picture-perfect images we have of American consumer culture, Irish tourist towns, and the institution of marriage and enter the world of her fictions-more contradictory, troubling, and true.

What happened to Ebenezer Scrooge after the night he was visited by the three spirits?When we left Ebenezer Scrooge at the end of A Christmas Carol, he appeared to be a man transformed. But did he sincerely repent and earn admission to heaven? The Trial of Ebenezer Scrooge, written in Dickensian style and with tongue firmly lodged in cheek, follows Scrooge through the Court of Heavenly Justice, where his soul''s fate is to be determined. In this courtroom drama, using frequent flashbacks, the author uncovers startling evidence, much of it directly from Dickens''s classic, that reveals Scrooge to have lived a saintly life before being confronted by three Christmas ghosts. Evidence mounts that Mr. Scrooge struck a Faustian bargain with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, a deal to extend his own mortality in exchange for yielding his soul as a tool for the forces of darkness to infiltrate heaven. Readers will enjoy the remaking of some of Dickens''s best-known characters. Tiny Tim emerges as a villain, while little Eppie, borrowed from George Eliot''s Silas Marner, is Scrooge''s protector and source of salvation. This new novel provides the much-needed redemption of Ebenezer Scrooge''s reputation and offers a welcome departure from the standard saccharine fare at Christmastime. Dickens buffs will have a merry time trying to find where Dickens''s voice ends and the author''s begins. All readers will puzzle over how we could have so misjudged Ebenezer Scrooge, or whether we judged Scrooge aright from the start.

George Dell''s Dance unto the Lord is a compelling fusion of history and fiction. Set in 1848 to 1852, when Ohio was considered to be the West, Dance unto the Lord transports the readers to Union Village, a Shaker community in southwestern Ohio. The novel traces the coming of age of Richard and Ruth, young people who wish to marry but are forbidden to do so by Richard''s parents. In desperation, Richard runs away to Cincinnati. Ruth, too, leaves her family. She settles in Union Village and eventually becomes a teacher at the Shaker school. Torn between her desire for freedom and the security of life with the Shakers, Ruth becomes increasingly more immersed in the Shaker society while dreaming of Richard and a life outside the community. Meanwhile, through his experiences with an ill-fated blacksmith''s shop and its owners, Richard learns that life in the city can be complicated and painful.As he traces Richard''s and Ruth''s experiences, Dell vividly re-creates the texture of rural and city life in mid-nineteenth-century Ohio, providing a fascinating, well-researched account of a long-gone era. Dance unto the Lord provides wonderfully detailed descriptions of a Shaker community and life style. This book will be compelling reading for anyone interested in the time period, the Shakers, or simply a good story.

Examines how medieval and early modern British texts use descriptions of archaeological objects to produce aesthetic and literary responses to questions of historicity and epistemology.

The Politics of Reproduction: Adoption, Abortion and Surrogacy in the Age of Neoliberalism uniquely brings together three sites of reproduction and reproductive politics to demonstrate their entanglement in creating or restricting options for family-making. The original essays in this collection-which draw from a wide range of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives-are attentive to neoliberalism's reshaping of economies and intimacies to better understand the politics of reproduction. By looking at particular instances (surrogacy in Mexico, forced sterilization in Peru, and racialized biopolitics in post-Katrina Mississippi, among other sites), The Politics of Reproduction focuses on the effects of a radically altered economic landscape on individual choice-making. As a whole, the volume critically engages the question of choice to better understand the costs of a political and ideological climate that encourages, even demands, individual solutions to intractable social problems. Whose choices are amplified in the use of new biomedical technologies and assisted reproduction? Why and how are we discouraged from understanding the economic motivations behind the "choice" to surrender a baby for adoption or to become a surrogate or to seek an abortion? Attentive to the historical, cultural, and ideological conjunctures of reproductive politics, The Politics of Reproduction makes a distinctive contribution to feminist analyses of the specific challenges posed by neoliberalism to reproductive possibilities, politics, and justice in the contemporary moment.

When did mothers start worrying so much? Why do they keep worrying so? Writing Maternity: Medicine, Anxiety, Rhetoric, and Genre answers these questions by identifying the nineteenth-century rhetorical origins of maternal anxiety, inviting readers to think about worrying not as something individual mothers do but as an affect that since Victorian times has defined middle-class motherhood itself. In this book, Dara Rossman Regaignon offers the first comprehensive study of child-rearing advice literature from early-nineteenth-century Britain and argues that the historical emergence of that genre catalyzed a durable shift in which maternal care was identified as maternal anxiety. Tracing the rhetorical circulation of this affect from advice literature through the memoirs of Mary Martha Sherwood (1775-1851) and Catharine Tait (1819-1878), as well as fiction by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontës, and Charlotte Mary Yonge, Regaignon gives maternal anxiety a literary-rhetorical history. She does this by bringing concepts such as uptake and genre ecology into literary studies from rhetorical genre theory, making a case for a mobile and culturally influential notion of genre. Examining specific case studies on child death, paid childcare, and infant doping, among others, Regaignon argues that the ideology of nurturing motherhood was predicated upon the rhetorical cultivation of maternal anxiety--which has had significant consequences for the experience of motherhood and maternal feeling.

Ira Mittelman, the middle-aged hero of "A Box of Ashes," one of two novellas in Little Men, is wrestling with a dilemma: should he fulfill his late father''s dying wish by taking the old man''s ashes back to Missouri, to scatter them on the grounds of Camp HaHaTonka, the Boy Scout camp where Ira spent several summers as a boy? It''s a long way to go just to dump some ashes, and if Ira makes this pilgrimage, his absence might jeopardize the fragile relationship he''s managed to maintain with his ex-wife (they''re still having sex every Friday night).In "Spivak in Babylon," Little Men''s other novella, it''s 1982, and Leo Spivak, an ambitious 30-year-old copywriter at a large Chicago advertising agency, is about to get his big break: a chance to go to Hollywood to participate for the first time in the filming of a television commercial. A week in Hollywood, on the company''s expense account! A room at the fabled Chateau Marmont (Garbo''s old suite, in fact)! The only problem is the subject of the commercial itself: a new feminine hygiene spray to be marketed to pre-adolescent girls. Hovering over all the proceedings in "Spivak in Babylon" is the genial, befuddled presence of President Ronald Reagan, the Leader of the Free World, who haunts Leo''s dreams.

Perspectives: Modes of Viewing and Knowing in Nineteenth-Century England reopens the question of classical perspective and its vicissitudes in aesthetic practice with a focus on texts of the 1830s to the end of the 1870s. Linda M. Shires demonstrates why and how artists and writers across media experimented with techniques of dissolution, combination, and multiple viewpoints much earlier in the century than intellectual historians generally assume. Arguing for a relationship between what she calls the disappearing "I" in poetry, a compromised omniscience, and the testing of a mastering eye in painting and photography, Shires argues that art forms themselves, rather than new technologies alone, reshaped the period by educating readers and viewers into new ways of knowing. In chapters on visual and verbal art and a waning theocentrism; D.G. Rossetti; Henry Peach Robinson and Lady Clementina Hawarden; and Robert Browning, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot, Shires revitalizes the currently available scholarship on connections among nineteenth-century art forms. This interdisciplinary study offers nuanced, close readings in order to rebut assertions of delayed artistic responses to the decreasing influence of traditional perspective. It shows how vision is bound up with all the senses of a viewer and it supports current concepts of modernism as transitional, rather than radical.