We’ve recently subscribed to a large collection of online books: eBrary.
eBrary is an enourmous resource, and includes over 3200 online books in the “Language and Literature” category alone. To use the collection you’ll need to download the eBrary Reader from the eBrary home page. Books from eBrary will be included in the LRC’s catalogue in the near future. For now, you can search directly through the eBrary catalogue.
If you have any questions about this resource, please contact me!
I often find myself trying to convince students of the value of our reference collection as an important place to begin the research process. Checking out some of the new titles arriving this week in the LRC, I’m reminded myself of some of the treasures that this underused collection houses.
We’ve just received an excellent 2 volume encyclopedia called Shakespeares after Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture This set documents the huge assortment of adaptations and reinventions of Shakespeare’s work, from comic strips to film adaptations to pop songs. This set also contains some good overview essays introducing each major section. You can find Shakespeares on Shakespeare in the Reference collection at PR 2880.A1 S48 2007.
The Woman in White
By Wilkie Collins
Edited by Maria K. Bachman & Don Richard Cox
Broadview Press, 2006
“This edition returns to the original text that galvanized England when it was published in serial form in All the Year Round magazine in 1860. Three different prefaces Collins wrote for the novel, as well as two of his essays on the book’s composition, are reprinted, along with nine illustrations. The appendices include contemporary reviews, along with essays on lunacy, asylums, mesmerism, and the rights of women. ” — Broadview Press
“In The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman has written a masterpiece that transcends genre. It is a children’s book that will appeal to adults, a fantasy novel that will charm even the most hardened realist. Best of all, the author doesn’t speak down to his audience, nor does he pull his punches; there is genuine terror in this book, and heartbreak, betrayal, and loss. There is also love, loyalty, and an abiding morality that infuses the story but never overwhelms it. This is one of those rare novels that one wishes would never end.” — Amazon.com
The Newly Born Woman“Published in France as La jeune née in 1975, and found here in its first English translation, The Newly Born Woman is a landmark text of the modern feminist movement. In it, Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément put forward the concept of écriture feminine, exploring the ways women’s sexuality and unconscious shape their imaginary, their language, and their writing. Through their readings of historical, literary, and psychoanalytic accounts, Cixous and Clément explore what is hidden and repressed in culture, revealing the unconscious of history.” –University of Minnesota Press
With Margaret Atwood’s visit to MacEwan looming in the near future, we’ve been trying to beef up our collection of Atwood materials. Some of the latest arrivals are highlighted below. For an extensive overview of Atwood books, you can take a look at this predefined catalogue search, or visit the LRC’s Oryx and Crake web guide.
Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe of Terror and Trial
Erika Gottlieb
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001
City Centre, Main Collection, PN56 .D94 G68 2001
“A comprehensive exploration of dystopian literature, from the hypothetical futures in Western classics such as Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four to the historical reality of writers from Eastern and Central Europe.” — From the publisher
The Handmaid’s Tale (DVD)
Directed by Volker Schlondorff, starring, Natasha Richardson, Faye Dunaway
MGM Home Entertainment, 2001
City Centre, Main Collection, PN1997 .H253 2001
Originally released as a motion picture in 1990, this film is based on Atwood’s book by the same name. The LRC copy comes with public performance rights and can legally be shown in class.
The Callisto Myth from Ovid to Atwood: Initiation and Rape in Literature
Kathleen Wall
McGill-Queen’s University Press, c1988
City Centre, Main Collection, PN57 .C27 W34 1988
” Wall parallels Callisto’s rape by Zeus with the rape of feminity by the patriarchy and its institutions. Tracing the myth through 15 works of American, English, and Canadian literature, the author gives a fresh feminist reading of these narratives and demonstrates that the Callisto myth is a powerful archetype which illustrates both the victimization of women and their search for independence and autonomy.” — Book News
More, more, more . . .
Louise Erdrich
Baptism of Desire: Poems
New York: Perennial, 1989
City Centre, Main Collection, PS3555 .R42 B3 2001
This rich book will attract Erdrich fans. Like Jacklight, her first book of poems, it has tales of Potchikoo, a Chippewa Trickster, and of Mary Kroger, a butcher’s wife. In the complex and masterful “Hydra,” a poem written during pregnancy, Erdrich addresses both the mythical serpent and her unborn child–“Blessed one, beating your tail across heaven,/ uncoiling through the length of my life”–and compares herself to both Mary and Eve. Writing “Snake of hard hours, you are my poetry,” she concludes, like Eve, that its place is “at my ear.” As in a sequence on saints and sacraments, Erdrich here appropriates and transforms the Catholic theology learned as a child. A graceful, deeply metaphoric sequence on gardening, childrearing, and marriage concludes the book. — Library Journal
Rose Marie Burwell
Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels
Cambridge UP, 1996
When Ernest Hemingway committed suicide in 1961 he left four unfinished works–A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream, The Garden of Eden, and an untitled work on his travels in Africa. The edited versions that have come down to readers and scholars of Hemingway appear as distinct, disjointed texts that fit oddly into his oeuvre. Through extensive literary detective work Burwell has uncovered substantial evidence that Hemingway in fact designed the three published works as a trilogy, what she terms “his own Portrait of the Artist.” — From the publisher
Patricia WaughMetafiction begins by surveying the state of contemporary fiction in Britain and America and explores the complex political, social and economic factors which influence critical judgment of fiction. The author shows how, as the novel has been eclipsed by the mass media, novelists have sought to retain and regain a wide readership by drawing on the themes and preoccupations of these forms. — From the publisher
See below for more new materials in the LRC (more…)
The LRC runnneth over with new materials! See some selections below:
A Necessary Fantasy? The Heroic Figure in Children’s Popular Culture
Dudley Jones and Tony Watkins
Garland, 2000
City Centre, Main Collection, P94.5 .C55 N43 2000
“This volume joins the excellent series edited by Jack Zipes, which offers sophisticated critical studies that challenge the canon and canonized readings of literature for children.”
-Choice
A Selection of the Poems of Laura Riding
Ed. Robert Nye
Persea Books, 1996
City Centre, Main Collection, PS3519 .A363 A6 1996
“Editor Nye presents poems by modern literature’s angel of devastation and Robert Graves’s mad muse–poems that have come to seem more and more important to literature. Equal parts stage rhetoric and singsong, Riding’s poems are like prophecies uttered by a child. Her influence can be felt not only in the work of her sometime lover Graves but in that of poets as diverse as W.H. Auden, May Swenson, and John Ashbery.” -Library Journal
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, (A story of New York, 1893) an authoritative text, backgrounds and sources, the author and the novel, reviews and criticism
Stephen Crane, edited by Thomas A. Gullason
WW Norton, 1979
City Centre, Main Collection, PS1449 .C85 M34 1979
“Stephen Crane’s first novel is the tale of a pretty young slum girl driven to brutal excesses by poverty and loneliness. It was considered so sexually frank and realistic, that the book had to be privately printed at first. It and GEORGE’S MOTHER, the shorter novel that follows in this edition, were eventually hailed as the first genuine expressions of Naturalism in American letters and established their creator as the American apostle of an artistic revolution which was to alter the shape and destiny of civilization itself. “
See more new materials below: (more…)
Some interesting new receipts in the LRC this week:
Faulkner’s Narrative Poetics: Style as Vision
Arthur F. Kinney
University of Massachusetts Press, 1978
From the book jacket: “This is the first major attempt to understand Faulkner’s fiction and famous convoluted style by examining his work alongside those novelists Faulkner himself studied. Pointing directly to similarities in purpose and style, Arthur F. Kinney argues that Faulkner’s technique was highly controlled and necessary, the only way he could find to catch precisely the ideas and emotions known and intuited, in the characters he created and the readers he envisioned.”
The Art of Crime: The Plays and Films of Harold Pinter and David Mamet
Leslie Kane, Editor
Routledge, 2004
“The roster of con artists, liars and thieves and the themes of justice, violence and moral ambiguity in the works of Mamet and Pinter attest to the centrality of crime for those writers. In this collection, Lane (English, Westfield State College) has gathered 14 original essays that consider individual plays and screenplays as well as topics such as Pinter and Mamet in the context of the Victorian concept of crime and the descendants of Melville’s Confidence Man in Mamet’s work. Lane introduces the volume with a critical overview of both dramatists.”
Gothic Passages:Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic
Justin D. Edwards
University of Iowa Press, 2003
From the book jacket — “This groundbreaking study analyzes the development of American gothic literature alongside nineteenth-century discourses of passing and racial ambiguity. Justin Edwards examines how nineteenth-century writers gothicized biracial and passing figures in order to frame them within the rubric of a “demonization of difference.” This groundbreaking study analyzes the development of American gothic literature alongside nineteenth-century discourses of passing and racial ambiguity.”
See below for (many) more new materials.
Beyond the Muse of Memory: Essays on Contemporary American Poets
Laurence Lieberman
University of Missouri Press, 1995
PS 325 .L48 1995
“With stunningly precise formal, biographical, and cultural analysis, Laurence Lieberman turns his critical eye to American poets and confirms his prodigious talent not only as a narrative poet, but as a critic and essayist as well. What Lieberman aspires to do in Beyond the Muse of Memory, a collection of new and previously published essays, is to send the reader back to major poets for a fresh look and to neglected artists for close study.”
- University of Missouri Press
The Maximus Poems“This complete edition of The Maximus Poems brings together the three volumes of Charles Olson’s long poem in an authoritative version.”
-University of California Press
Locations of the Sacred: Essays on Religion, Literature, and Canadian Culture
William Closson James
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
PS 8101 . R4 J36 2000″
In ten lively and wide-ranging essays, William Closson James examines various derivations of the sacred in contemporary Canadian culture. Most of the essays focus on the religious aspects of modern Canadian English fiction — for example, in essays on the fiction of Hugh MacLennan, Morley Callaghan, Margaret Atwood and Joy Kogawa. But James also explores other, non-literary events and activities in which Canadians have found something transcendant or revelatory. “
-Wilfrid Laurier University Press
See more new titles below:
