Name: Strange Talk
Brand: Gavin Jones
Price: 18.95 USD
Availability: InStock

Gavin Jones

Strange Talk

$18.95

Late-nineteenth-century America was crazy about dialect: vernacular varieties of American English entertained mass audiences in "local color" stories, in realist novels, and in poems and plays. But dialect was also at the heart of anxious debates about the moral degeneration of urban life, the ethnic impact of foreign immigration, the black presence in white society, and the female influence on masculine authority. Celebrations of the rustic raciness in American vernacular were undercut by fears that dialect was a force of cultural dissolution with the power to contaminate the dominant language.

In this volume, Gavin Jones explores the aesthetic politics of this neglected "cult of the vernacular" in little-known regionalists such as George Washington Cable, in the canonical work of Mark Twain, Henry James, Herman Melville, and Stephen Crane, and in the ethnic writing of Abraham Cahan and Paul Laurence Dunbar. He reveals the origins of a trend that deepened in subsequent literature: the use of minority dialect to formulate a political response to racial oppression, and to enrich diverse depictions of a multicultural nation.

Cover image for Strange Talk, isbn: 9780520921191

Jerome Loving

Walt Whitman

$38.95

Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself is the first full-length critical biography of Walt Whitman in more than forty years. Jerome Loving makes use of recently unearthed archival evidence and newspaper writings to present the most accurate, complete, and complex portrait of the poet to date. This authoritative biography affords fresh, often revelatory insights into many aspects of the poet's life, including his attitudes toward the emerging urban life of America, his relationships with his family members, his developing notions of male-male love, his attitudes toward the vexed issue of race, and his insistence on the union of American states. Virtually every chapter presents material that was previously unknown or unavailable, and Whitman emerges as never before, in all his complexity as a corporal, cerebral, and spiritual being. Loving gives us a new Poet of Democracy, one for the twenty-first century.

Loving brings to life the elusive early Whitman, detailing his unhappy teaching career, typesetting jobs, quarrels with editors, and relationships with family and friends. He takes us through the Civil War—with Whitman's moving descriptions of the wounded and dying he nursed, the battlegrounds and camps he visited—demonstrating why the war became one of the defining events of Whitman's life and poetry. Loving's account of Whitman's relationship with Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most complete and fascinating available. He also draws insights from new material about Whitman's life as a civil servant, his Lincoln lectures, and his abiding campaign to gain acceptance for what was regarded by many as a "dirty book." He examines each edition of Leaves of Grass in connection with the life and times that produced it, demonstrating how Whitman's poetry serves as a priceless historical document—marking such events as Grant's death, the completion of the Washington monument, Custer's defeat, and the Johnstown flood—at the same time that it reshapes the canon of American literature.

The most important gap in the Whitman record is his journalism, which has never been completely collected and edited. Previous biographers have depended on a very incomplete and inaccurate collection. Loving has found long-forgotten runs of the newspapers Whitman worked on and has gathered the largest collection of his journalism to date. He uses these pieces to significantly enhance our understanding of where Whitman stood in the political and ideological spectra of his era.

Loving tracks down the sources of anecdotes about Whitman, how they got passed from one biographer to another, were embellished and re-contextualized. The result is a biography in which nothing is claimed without a basis in the factual record. Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself will be an invaluable tool for generations to come, an essential resource in understanding Leaves of Grass and its poet—who defied literary decorum, withstood condemnation, and stubbornly pursued his own way.

Cover image for Walt Whitman, isbn: 9780520926226

Bruce Michelson

Printer's Devil

$85.00

Trained as a printer when still a boy, and thrilled throughout his life by the automation of printing and the headlong expansion of American publishing, Mark Twain wrote about the consequences of this revolution for culture and for personal identity. Printer’s Devil is the first book to explore these themes in some of Mark Twain's best-known literary works, and in his most daring speculations—on American society, the modern condition, and the nature of the self. Playfully and anxiously, Mark Twain often thought about typeset words and published images as powerful forces—for political and moral change, personal riches and ruin, and epistemological turmoil. In his later years, Mark Twain wrote about the printing press as a center of metaphysical power, a force that could alter the fabric of reality. Studying these themes in Mark Twain’s writings, Bruce Michelson also provides a fascinating overview of technological changes that transformed the American printing and publishing industries during Twain's lifetime, changes that opened new possibilities for content, for speed of production, for the size and diversity of a potential audience, and for international fame. The story of Mark Twain’s life and art, amid this media revolution, is a story with powerful implications for our own time, as we ride another wave of radical change: for printed texts, authors, truth, and consciousness.

Cover image for Printer's Devil, isbn: 9780520932845

Brom Weber

The Letters of Hart Crane, 1916-1932

$29.95

The Letters of Hart Crane: 1916-1932 provides an intimate portrait of one of America's most enigmatic and revered poets. Edited with care and insight, this collection showcases the rich emotional and intellectual landscape that defined Hart Crane's life and works. Known for his intense lyricism and ambitious poetic vision, Crane's correspondence reveals the same passionate drive for expression that animated his poetry. From letters to close friends like Gorham Munson and Waldo Frank to heartfelt, complex exchanges with his parents, these writings document Crane's artistic journey, personal struggles, and relentless pursuit of connection. The letters reflect not only the creative mind behind The Bridge but also the vulnerabilities and challenges that shaped his tumultuous life.

This collection is more than a historical record; it’s an exploration of the dynamic interplay between Crane's personal experiences and his poetic output. Through his correspondence, readers gain insight into the profound emotional impulses that drove his work, including his deep need for affection, his struggles with self-doubt, and his moments of creative triumph. Supplemented by meticulous editorial notes and a thoughtful chronology of his life, The Letters of Hart Crane offers a window into the heart and mind of a poet whose legacy continues to resonate, making it an essential resource for scholars and admirers of modern American poetry alike.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1952.

Cover image for The Letters of Hart Crane, 1916-1932, isbn: 9780520346796

James Campbell

Syncopations

$34.95

This compulsively readable collection of profiles and essays by James Campbell, tied together by a beguiling autobiographical thread, proffers unique observations on writers and writing in the post-1950s period. Campbell considers writers associated with the New Yorker magazine, including John Updike, William Maxwell, Truman Capote, and Jonathan Franzen. Continuing his longterm engagement with African American authors, he offers an account of his legal battle with the FBI over James Baldwin's file and a new profile of Amiri Baraka. He also focuses on the Beat poets Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, as well as writers such as Edmund White and Thom Gunn. Campbell's concluding essay on his childhood in Scotland gracefully connects the book's autobiographical dots.

Cover image for Syncopations, isbn: 9780520941083

Mark Twain

Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1

$26.95

Mark Twain's final and uncensored masterpiece, presented in three volumes, is a landmark publication in American literature.

“Twain will begin to seem strange again, alluring and still astonishing . . . in ways that still resonate with us.”—New York Times

“His crystalline humor and expansive range are a continuous source of delight and awe.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review

"I've struck it!" Mark Twain wrote in a 1904 letter to a friend. "And I will give it away—to you. You will never know how much enjoyment you have lost until you get to dictating your autobiography." Thus, after dozens of false starts and hundreds of pages, Twain embarked on his "Final (and Right) Plan" for telling the story of his life. His innovative notion—to "talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment"—meant that his thoughts could range freely. The strict instruction that many of these texts remain unpublished for 100 years meant that when they came out, he would be "dead, and unaware, and indifferent," and that he was therefore free to speak his "whole frank mind." The year 2010 marks the 100th anniversary of Twain's death. In celebration of this important milestone and in honor of the cherished tradition of publishing Mark Twain's works, UC Press is proud to offer for the first time Mark Twain's uncensored autobiography in its entirety and exactly as he left it. This major literary event brings to readers, admirers, and scholars the first of three volumes and presents Mark Twain's authentic and unsuppressed voice, brimming with humor, ideas, and opinions, and speaking clearly from the grave as he intended.

Editors:

Harriet E. Smith, Benjamin Griffin, Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Sharon K. Goetz, Leslie Myrick

Cover image for Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1, isbn: 9780520946996

Robert Creeley

The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley

$29.95

Robert Creeley is one of the most celebrated and influential American poets. A stylist of the highest order, Creeley imbued his correspondence with the literary artistry he brought to his poetry. Through his engagements with mentors such as William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, peers such as Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac, and mentees such as Charles Bernstein, Anselm Berrigan, Ed Dorn, Susan Howe, and Tom Raworth, Creeley helped forge a new poetry that re-imagined writing for his and subsequent generations. This first-ever volume of his letters, written between 1945 and 2005, document the life, work, and times of one of our greatest writers, and represent a critical archive of the development of contemporary American poetry, as well as the changing nature of letter-writing and communication in the digital era.

Cover image for The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley, isbn: 9780520956612

Mark Twain

Tom Sawyer Abroad / Tom Sawyer, Detective

$20.95

These unjustly neglected works, among the most enjoyable of Mark Twain's novels, follow Tom, Huck, and Jim as they travel across the Atlantic in a balloon, then down the Mississippi to help solve a mysterious crime. Both with the original illustrations by Dan Beard and A.B. Frost.

"Do you reckon Tom Sawyer was satisfied after all them adventures? No, he wasn’t. It only just pisoned him for more." So Huck declares at the start of these once-celebrated but now little-known sequels to his own adventures. Tom, Huck, and Jim set sail to Africa in a futuristic air balloon, where they survive encounters with lions, robbers, and fleas and see some of the world’s greatest wonders.

Charles Olson

Collected Prose

$38.95

The prose writings of Charles Olson (1910–1970) have had a far-reaching and continuing impact on post-World War II American poetics. Olson's theories, which made explicit the principles of his own poetics and those of the Black Mountain poets, were instrumental in defining the sense of the postmodern in poetry and form the basis of most postwar free verse.

The Collected Prose brings together in one volume the works published for the most part between 1946 and 1969, many of which are now out of print. A valuable companion to editions of Olson's poetry, the book backgrounds the poetics, preoccupations, and fascinations that underpin his great poems. Included are Call Me Ishmael, a classic of American literary criticism; the influential essays "Projective Verse" and "Human Universe"; and essays, book reviews, and Olson's notes on his studies. In these pieces one can trace the development of his new science of man, called "muthologos," a radical mix of myth and phenomenology that Olson offered in opposition to the mechanistic discourse and rationalizing policy he associated with America's recent wars in Europe and Asia.

Editors Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander offer helpful annotations throughout, and poet Robert Creeley, who enjoyed a long and mutually influential relationship with Olson, provides the book's introduction.

Cover image for Collected Prose, isbn: 9780520919020

Mark Twain

The Devil's Race-Track

$34.95

Mark Twain explores the darker side of life in these lesser-known later writings dealing with personal tragedies, nightmarish world events, and a doubtful cosmic order. He views his own situation as that of a ship trapped in a fearsome Bermuda Triangle-like region, the Devil's Race-Track. He sees history as a treadmill of endlessly and monotonously repeated events. And he conceives of a universal food chain, a vast round of devourers who in their turn become victims, humankind and God included. The tone of these writings is lightened considerably by Mark Twain's sagely ironic humor and his warmth, which together balance his tough-mindedness. And even when he shows the human race caught in some vicious circle, he may be seen courageously seeking a way out and at times believing he has found it.

Mark Twain explores the darker side of life in these lesser-known later writings dealing with personal tragedies, nightmarish world events, and a doubtful cosmic order. He views his own situation as that of a ship trapped in a fearsome Bermuda Triangle-li

Cover image for The Devil's Race-Track, isbn: 9780520930223

Peter Makin

Provence and Pound

$29.95

Provence and Pound offers a compelling exploration of the relationship between Ezra Pound and the tradition of Provençal poetry. Bridging centuries and cultures, the book examines how Pound—one of the most influential modernist poets—engaged with the medieval troubadours of 12th-century Provence, whose refined lyricism and courtly ideals shaped his understanding of poetic form, rhythm, and artistry. The troubadours, renowned for their mastery of the canso and other verse forms, created a literary culture that Pound saw as vibrant, organic, and deeply influential in the evolution of European poetics. By tracing his engagement with Provençal poetry, this study not only sheds light on Pound’s poetic evolution but also challenges traditional interpretations of the troubadour legacy.

The book positions Pound as a revisionist scholar of the troubadours, one who bypassed the rigorous philological traditions of Provençal studies in favor of a more intuitive and artistic approach. While his grasp of Provençal language may have been imprecise, his ability to distill the essential spirit of the troubadour ethos allowed him to reinvigorate their influence for a modern audience. The discussion also reveals how Pound’s fascination with figures like Bertran de Born evolved over time, reflecting his shifting perspectives on poetry, politics, and aesthetics. By placing the medieval and the modern in direct conversation, Provence and Pound highlights the enduring power of the troubadours and underscores Pound’s singular role in resurrecting their legacy within the avant-garde movements of the 20th century.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.

Cover image for Provence and Pound, isbn: 9780520335615

Mark Twain

Is He Dead?

$23.95

The University of California Press is delighted to announce the new publication of this three-act play by one of America's most important and well-loved writers. A highly entertaining comedy that has never appeared in print or on stage, Is He Dead? is finally available to the wide audience Mark Twain wished it to reach. Written in 1898 in Vienna as Twain emerged from one of the deepest depressions of his life, the play shows its author's superb gift for humor operating at its most energetic. The text of Is He Dead?, based on the manuscript in the Mark Twain Papers, appears here together with an illuminating essay by renowned Mark Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin and with Barry Moser's original woodcut illustrations in a volume that will surely become a treasured addition to the Mark Twain legacy.

Richly intermingling elements of burlesque, farce, and social satire with a wry look at the world market in art, Is He Dead? centers on a group of poor artists in Barbizon, France, who stage the death of a friend to drive up the price of his paintings. In order to make this scheme succeed, the artists hatch some hilarious plots involving cross-dressing, a full-scale fake funeral, lovers' deceptions, and much more.

Mark Twain was fascinated by the theater and made many attempts at playwriting, but this play is certainly his best. Is He Dead? may have been too "out there" for the Victorian 1890s, but today's readers will thoroughly enjoy Mark Twain's well-crafted dialogue, intriguing cast of characters, and above all, his characteristic ebullience and humor. In Shelley Fisher Fishkin's estimation, it is "a champagne cocktail of a play--not too dry, not too sweet, with just the right amount of bubbles and buzz."

Cover image for Is He Dead?, isbn: 9780520939899

Kris Fresonke

West of Emerson

$29.95

Where did American literature start? The familiar story of Emerson and Thoreau has them setting up shop in Concord, Massachusetts, and determining the course of American writing. West of Emerson overhauls this story of origins as it shifts the context for these literary giants from the civilized East to the wide-open spaces of the Louisiana Purchase. Kris Fresonke tracks down the texts by explorers of the far West that informed Nature, Emerson's most famous essay, and proceeds to uncover the parodic Western politics at play in classic New England works of Romanticism. Westerns, this book shows, helped create "Easterns."

West of Emerson roughs up genteel literary history: Fresonke argues for a fresh mix of American literature, one based on the far reaches of American territory and American literary endeavor. Reading into the record the unexplored writings of Lewis and Clark, Zebulon Pike, Stephen Long, and William Emory, Fresonke forges surprising connections between the American West and the American visions emanating from the neighborhood of Walden Pond. These connections open a new view of the politics--and, by way of the notion of "design," the theological lineage—of manifest destiny. Finally, Fresonke's book shows how the cast of the American canon, no less than the direction of American politics, came to depend on what design one placed on the continent.

Cover image for West of Emerson, isbn: 9780520936225

Walter Benn Michaels

The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism

$31.95

The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism discusses ways of creating value in turn-of-the-century American capitalism. Focusing on such topics as the alienation of property, the invention of masochism, and the battle over free silver, it examines the participation of cultural forms in these phenomena. It imagines a literary history that must at the same time be social, economic, and legal; and it imagines a literature that, to be understood at all, must be understood both as a producer and a product of market capitalism.

Cover image for The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, isbn: 9780520908291

Mark Twain

Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals, Volume II

$84.00

The twelve notebooks in volume 1 provided information about the eighteen years in which the most profound, even dramatic, changes took place in Clemens' life. He early achieved the limits of his boyhood ambition by becoming a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River, a position there is no reason to believe he would have abandoned if the Civil War had not forced him to do so. In fleeing from a war which principle and temperament prevented him from supporting, Clemens entered into the first stages of his literary career by serving as a reporter for newspapers in Virginia City and San Francisco. When the restricted experiences available to a local reporter had been thoroughly explored, he moved on as a traveling correspondent to the Sandwich Islands and then still farther to Europe and the Near East. The latter travels provided him with material for The Innocents Abroad, the book that established Mark Twain as a popular author with an international reputation in 1869. In 1872 he further exploited his personal history by publishing Roughing It and in the same year visited England to gather material on English people and institutions. He returned to England the following year, this time accompanied by his family and by a secretary who would record the observations printed as the last notebook in volume 1. Volume 2 of Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals, documenting Clemens' activities in the years from 1877 to 1883, consists largely of the record of three trips which would serve as the source for three travel narratives: the excursion to Bermuda, a prolonged tour of Europe, and an evocative return to the Mississippi River. Despite the common impulse to preserve observations and impressions for literary use, the contents of the notebooks are remarkably different in their vitality-and the works which developed from the notes are correspondingly varied.

The twelve notebooks in volume 1 provided information about the eighteen years in which the most profound, even dramatic, changes took place in Clemens' life. He early achieved the limits of his boyhood ambition by becoming a steamboat pilot on the Missis

Cover image for Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals, Volume II, isbn: 9780520905535

Ted Genoways

Walt Whitman and the Civil War

$44.95

Shortly after the third edition of Leaves of Grass was published, in 1860, Walt Whitman seemed to drop off the literary map, not to emerge again until his brother George was wounded at Fredericksburg two and a half years later. Past critics have tended to read this silence as evidence of Whitman's indifference to the Civil War during its critical early months. In this penetrating, original, and beautifully written book, Ted Genoways reconstructs those forgotten years—locating Whitman directly through unpublished letters and never-before-seen manuscripts, as well as mapping his associations through rare period newspapers and magazines in which he published. Genoways's account fills a major gap in Whitman's biography and debunks the myth that Whitman was unaffected by the country's march to war. Instead, Walt Whitman and the Civil War reveals the poet's active participation in the early Civil War period and elucidates his shock at the horrors of war months before his legendary journey to Fredericksburg, correcting in part the poet's famous assertion that the "real war will never get in the books."

Shortly after the third edition of Leaves of Grass was published, in 1860, Walt Whitman seemed to drop off the literary map, not to emerge again until his brother George was wounded at Fredericksburg two and a half years later. Past critics have te

Cover image for Walt Whitman and the Civil War, isbn: 9780520943087

Blake Nevius

Edith Wharton

$23.95

Blake Nevius’s close analysis and appraisal of Edith Wharton’s novels and stories reveals the modernity of her fiction and shows why she should have a permanent claim on our attention. Wharton is the only American novelist who has dealt successfully and at length with the remains of traditional New York society, which barely survived the beginning of the twentieth century. She illuminated, as no other novelist of her generation was able to do, a major aspect of U.S. social history through the dramatic conflict between the ideals of the old mercantile and the new industrial societies. Nevius also argues that Wharton, next to Henry James, is our most successful novelist of manners and, along with him, helped preserve the artistic dignity of the novel This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1953.

Cover image for Edith Wharton, isbn: 9780520377561

Gloria C. Erlich

The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton

$52.95

Starting with the tensions in the early family constellation, Gloria C. Erlich traces Edith Wharton's erotic evolution—from her early repression of sexuality and her celibate marriage to her discovery of passion in a rapturous midlife love affair with the bisexual Morton Fullerton. Analyzing the novelist's life, letters, and fiction, Erlich reveals several interrelated identity systems—the filial, the sexual, and the creative—that evolved together over the course of Wharton's lifetime.

Starting with the tensions in the early family constellation, Gloria C. Erlich traces Edith Wharton's erotic evolution—from her early repression of sexuality and her celibate marriage to her discovery of passion in a rapturous midlife love affair with the

Cover image for The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton, isbn: 9780520911710

Robert Leigh Davis

Whitman and the Romance of Medicine

$57.95

In this compelling, accessible examination of one of America's greatest cultural and literary figures, Robert Leigh Davis details the literary and social significance of Walt Whitman's career as a nurse during the American Civil War. Davis shows how the concept of "convalescence" in nineteenth-century medicine and philosophy—along with Whitman's personal war experiences—provide a crucial point of convergence for Whitman's work as a gay and democratic writer.

In his analysis of Whitman's writings during this period—Drum-Taps, Democratic Vistas, Memoranda During the War, along with journalistic works and correspondence—Davis argues against the standard interpretation that Whitman's earliest work was his best. He finds instead that Whitman's hospital writings are his most persuasive account of the democratic experience. Deeply moved by the courage and dignity of common soldiers, Whitman came to identify the Civil War hospitals with the very essence of American democratic life, and his writing during this period includes some of his most urgent reflections on suffering, sympathy, violence, and love. Davis concludes this study with an essay on the contemporary medical writer Richard Selzer, who develops the implications of Whitman's ideas into a new theory of medical narrative.

In this compelling, accessible examination of one of America's greatest cultural and literary figures, Robert Leigh Davis details the literary and social significance of Walt Whitman's career as a nurse during the American Civil War. Davis shows how the c

Cover image for Whitman and the Romance of Medicine, isbn: 9780520918641

Robert Duncan

$34.95

This volume in the Collected Writings of Robert Duncan series gathers a far-reaching selection of Robert Duncan’s prose writings including most of his longer and more well-known essays along with other prose that has never been widely available. Ranging in original publication dates between 1940 and 1985, the forty-one titles reveal a great deal about Duncan’s life in poetry—including his impressions of poets whose work he admires, both contemporaries and precursors. Evocative and eclectic, this work delineates the intellectual contexts and sources of Duncan’s poetics, and opens a window onto the literary communities in which he participated.

Cover image for Robert Duncan, isbn: 9780520956650

Ann Fabian

The Unvarnished Truth

$34.95

The practice of selling one's tale of woe to make a buck has long been a part of American culture. The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America is a powerful cultural history of how ordinary Americans crafted and sold their stories of hardship and calamity during the nineteenth century. Ann Fabian examines the tales of beggars, convicts, ex-slaves, prisoners of the Confederacy, and others to explore cultural authority, truth-telling, and the nature of print media as the country was shifting to a market economy. This well-crafted book describes the fascinating controversies surrounding these little-read tales and returns them to the social worlds where they were produced.

Drawing on an enormous number of personal narratives—accounts of mostly poor, suffering, and often uneducated Americans—The Unvarnished Truth analyzes a long-ignored tradition in popular literature. Historians have treated the spread of literacy and the growth of print culture as a chapter in the democratization of refinement, but these tales suggest that this was not always the case. Producing stories that purported to be the plain, unvarnished truth, poor men and women edged their way onto the cultural stage, using storytelling strategies far older than those relying on a Renaissance sense of refinement and polish. This book introduces a unique collection of tales to explore the nature of truth, authenticity, and representation.

Cover image for The Unvarnished Truth, isbn: 9780520928039

Peter L. Cooper

Signs and Symptoms

$23.95

Signs and Symptoms: Thomas Pynchon and the Contemporary World by Peter L. Cooper situates Pynchon’s achievement within the philosophical, literary, and scientific currents of modern thought, emphasizing his place among American counterrealists. While earlier novelists grounded their work in the traditions of realism and naturalism—offering psychologically rounded characters, coherent narration, and cause-and-effect logic—Pynchon and his contemporaries, including Heller, Vonnegut, Barth, Burroughs, and Nabokov, resist such conventions. Their fiction portrays diminished, often cartoonish characters adrift in grotesque and absurd worlds shaped by entropy, conspiratorial forces, or unfathomable chance. These counterrealists deliberately frustrate narrative expectations, undermining traditional concepts of identity, causality, and meaning to reflect a twentieth-century reality that itself feels fragmented, unstable, and menacing. For Pynchon in particular, paranoia, conspiracy, and epistemological uncertainty become structural motifs, dramatizing the tension between too little structure—cosmic drift toward entropy—and too much structure—bureaucratic control and technological domination.

Cooper argues that although Pynchon mocks humanity’s compulsion to impose order through patterns and interpretive systems, he also acknowledges their necessity. His fiction stages this paradox through unreliable narrators, labyrinthine plots, proliferating symbols, and scientific metaphors that highlight the limits of perception and the inevitability of projection. In works such as *The Crying of Lot 49* and *Gravity’s Rainbow*, characters struggle to interpret evidence, never knowing whether they uncover hidden systems or simply overlay their own delusions upon reality. This epistemological anxiety, shared across counterrealist fiction, links Pynchon to Borges’s infinite regress of invented realities and Barth’s metafictional games, yet Pynchon maintains a more urgent political and historical focus. By tracing the interplay of paranoia, grotesque absurdity, and entropic decline in Pynchon’s oeuvre, Cooper illuminates the novelist’s distinctive position at the crossroads of modern fiction, where satire, science, and philosophy converge to expose the precariousness of knowledge, identity, and control in the contemporary world.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1983.

Cover image for Signs and Symptoms, isbn: 9780520314733

Mark Twain

Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 3

$22.95

Mark Twain's final and uncensored masterpiece, presented in three volumes, is a landmark publication in American literature.

“Twain will begin to seem strange again, alluring and still astonishing . . . in ways that still resonate with us.”—New York Times

“His crystalline humor and expansive range are a continuous source of delight and awe.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review

When the first volume of Mark Twain’s uncensored Autobiography was published in 2010, it was hailed as an essential addition to the shelf of his works and a crucial document for our understanding of the great humorist’s life and times. This third and final volume crowns and completes his life’s work. Like its companion volumes, it chronicles Twain's inner and outer life through a series of daily dictations that go wherever his fancy leads.

Created from March 1907 to December 1909, these dictations present Mark Twain at the end of his life: receiving an honorary degree from Oxford University; railing against Theodore Roosevelt; founding numerous clubs; incredulous at an exhibition of the Holy Grail; credulous about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays; relaxing in Bermuda; observing (and investing in) new technologies. The Autobiography’s “Closing Words” movingly commemorate his daughter Jean, who died on Christmas Eve 1909. Also included in this volume is the previously unpublished “Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript,” Mark Twain’s caustic indictment of his “putrescent pair” of secretaries and the havoc that erupted in his house during their residency.

Fitfully published in fragments at intervals throughout the twentieth century, Autobiography of Mark Twain has now been critically reconstructed and made available as it was intended to be read. Fully annotated by the editors of the Mark Twain Project, the complete Autobiography emerges as a landmark publication in American literature.

Editors: Benjamin Griffin and Harriet Elinor Smith
Associate Editors: Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Amanda Gagel, Sharon K. Goetz, Leslie Diane Myrick, Christopher M. Ohge

Cover image for Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 3, isbn: 9780520961869

Kerry Driscoll

Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples

$34.95

Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples is the first book-length study of the writer’s evolving views regarding the aboriginal inhabitants of North America and the Southern Hemisphere, and his deeply conflicted representations of them in fiction, newspaper sketches, and speeches. Using a wide range of archival materials—including previously unexamined marginalia in books from Clemens’s personal library—Driscoll charts the development of the writer’s ethnocentric attitudes about Indians and savagery in relation to the various geographic and social milieus of communities he inhabited at key periods in his life, from antebellum Hannibal, Missouri, and the Sierra Nevada mining camps of the 1860s to the progressive urban enclave of Hartford’s Nook Farm. The book also examines the impact of Clemens’s 1895–96 world lecture tour, when he traveled to Australia and New Zealand and learned firsthand about the dispossession and mistreatment of native peoples under British colonial rule. This groundbreaking work of cultural studies offers fresh readings of canonical texts such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Roughing It, and Following the Equator, as well as a number of Twain’s shorter works.

Mark Twain

Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals, Volume III

$84.00

Volume III of Mark Twain's notebooks spans the years 1883 to 1891, a period during which Mark Twain's personal fortunes reached their zenith, as he emerged as one of the most successful authors and publishers in American literary history. During these years Life on the Mississippi, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court appeared, revealing the diversity, depth, and vitality of Mark Twain's literary talents. With his speeches, his public performances, and his lecture tour of 1884/1885, he became the most recognizable of national figures. At the same time, Mark Twain's growing fame and prosperity allowed him to plunge deeply into the business world, a sphere not suited to his erratic energies. He created the subscription publish firm of Charles L. Webster & Company, Which published the most profitable book of its time, the Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant. And he became the primary financial support for the ingenious but imperfectible Paige typesetter. Within a few years both the publishing company and the typesetter had taxed Mark Twain's patience, and pocket, beyond endurance. The near bankruptcy of the publishing firm and the debacle of the typesetter scheme finally resulted in 1891 in a drastic decision--to leave the house in Hartford, Connecticut, which had long been the symbol of Mark Twain's rising fortunes and idyllic family life, and move to Europe for an indefinite period in the hope of reducing the family's living expenses. The Clemens family would never return to the Hartford house, and the European stay would lengthen into an almost unbroken nine years of exile. Mark Twain's notebooks permit an intimate view of this turbulent period, whose triumphs were tempered by intimations of financial disaster and personal bitterness.

Volume III of Mark Twain's notebooks spans the years 1883 to 1891, a period during which Mark Twain's personal fortunes reached their zenith, as he emerged as one of the most successful authors and publishers in American literary history. During these yea

Mark Twain

Mark Twain’s Helpful Hints for Good Living

$21.95

Irreverent, charming, eminently quotable, this handbook—an eccentric etiquette guide for the human race—contains sixty-nine aphorisms, anecdotes, whimsical suggestions, maxims, and cautionary tales from Mark Twain's private and published writings. It dispenses advice and reflections on family life and public manners; opinions on topics such as dress, health, food, and childrearing and safety; and more specialized tips, such as those for dealing with annoying salesmen and burglars. Culled from Twain's personal letters, autobiographical writings, speeches, novels, and sketches, these pieces are delightfully fresh, witty, startlingly relevant, and bursting with Twain's characteristic ebullience for life. They also remind us exactly how Mark Twain came to be the most distinctive and well-known American literary voice in the world. These texts, some of them new or out of print for decades, have been selected and meticulously prepared by the editors at the Mark Twain Project.

Cover image for Mark Twain’s Helpful Hints for Good Living, isbn: 9780520931343

Arnold Krupat

The Voice in the Margin

$23.95

In its consideration of American Indian literature as a rich and exciting body of work, The Voice in the Margin invites us to broaden our notion of what a truly inclusive American literature might be, and of how it might be placed in relation to an international—a "cosmopolitan"—literary canon. The book comes at a time when the most influential national media have focused attention on the subject of the literary canon. They have made it an issue not merely of academic but of general public concern, expressing strong opinions on the subject of what the American student should or should not read as essential or core texts. Is the literary canon simply a given of tradition and history, or is it, and must it be, constantly under construction? The question remains hotly contested to the present moment.

Arnold Krupat argues that the literary expression of the indigenous peoples of the United States has claims on us to more than marginal attention. Demonstrating a firm grasp of both literary history and contemporary critical theory, he situates Indian literature, traditional and modern, in a variety of contexts and categories. His extensive knowledge of the history and current theory of ethnography recommends the book to anthropologists and folklorists as well as to students and teachers of literature, both canonical and noncanonical. The materials covered, the perspectives considered, and the learning displayed all make The Voice in the Margin a major contribution to the exciting field of contemporary cultural studies.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.

Cover image for The Voice in the Margin, isbn: 9780520323452

Mark Twain

The Prince and the Pauper

$24.95

"What am I writing? A historical tale of 300 years ago, simply for the love of it." Mark Twain’s "tale" became his first historical novel, The Prince and the Pauper, published in 1881. Intricately plotted, it was intended to have the feel of history even though it was only the stuff of legend. In sixteenth-century England, young Prince Edward (son of Henry VIII) and Tom Canty, a pauper boy who looks exactly like him, are suddenly forced to change places. The prince endures "rags & hardships" while the pauper suffers the "horrible miseries of princedom." Mark Twain called his book a "tale for young people of all ages," and it has become a classic of American literature.

The first edition in 1881 was fully illustrated by Frank Merrill, John Harley, and L. S. Ipsen. The boys in these illustrations, Mark Twain said, "look and dress exactly as I used to see them cast in my mind. . . . It is a vast pleasure to see them cast in the flesh, so to speak." This Mark Twain Library edition exactly reproduces the text of the California scholarly edition, including all of the 192 illustrations that so pleased the author.

Cover image for The Prince and the Pauper, isbn: 9780520949584

Mark Twain

Mark Twain's Letters, Volume 4

$125.00

"You ought to see Livy & me, now-a-days—you never saw such a serenely satisfied couple of doves in all your life. I spent Jan 1, 2, 3 & 5 there, & left at 8 last night. With my vile temper & variable moods, it seems an incomprehensible miracle that we two have been right together in the same house half the time for a year & a half, & yet have never had a cross word, or a lover's 'tiff,' or a pouting spell, or a misunderstanding, or the faintest shadow of a jealous suspicion. Now isn't that absolutely wonderful? Could I have had such an experience with any other girl on earth? I am perfectly certain I could not. . . . We are to be married on Feb. 2d."

So begins Volume 4 of the letters, with Samuel Clemens anticipating his wedding to Olivia L. Langdon. The 338 letters in this volume document the first two years of a loving marriage that would last more than thirty years. They recount, in Clemens's own inimitable voice, a tumultuous time: a growing international fame, the birth of a sickly first child, and the near-fatal illness of his wife.

At the beginning of 1870, fresh from the success of The Innocents Abroad, Clemens is on "the long agony" of a lecture tour and planning to settle in Buffalo as editor of the Express. By the end of 1871, he has moved to Hartford and is again on tour, anticipating the publication of Roughing It and the birth of his second child. The intervening letters show Clemens bursting with literary ideas, business schemes, and inventions, and they show him erupting with frustration, anger, and grief, but more often with dazzling humor and surprising self-revelation. In addition to Roughing It, Clemens wrote some enduringly popular short pieces during this period, but he saved some of his best writing for private letters, many of which are published here for the first time.

"You ought to see Livy & me, now-a-days—you never saw such a serenely satisfied couple of doves in all your life. I spent Jan 1, 2, 3 & 5 there, & left at 8 last night. With my vile temper & variable moods, it seems an incomprehensible miracle that we

Cover image for Mark Twain's Letters, Volume 4, isbn: 9780520917293

Russ Castronovo

Fathering the Nation

$23.95

Russ Castronovo underscores the inherent contradictions between America's founding principles of freedom and the reality of slavery in a book that probes mid-nineteenth-century representations of the founding fathers. He finds that rather than being coherent and consensual, narratives of nationhood are inconsistent, ambivalent, and ironic. He examines competing expressions of national memory in a wide range of mid-nineteenth-century artifacts: slave autobiography, classic American fiction, monumental architecture, myths of the Revolution, proslavery writing, and landscape painting. Castronovo theorizes a new American cultural studies which takes into consideration what Toni Morrison calls the "Africanist presence" that permeates American literature. He presents a genealogy that recovers those members of the national family whose status challenges the body politic and its history. The forgotten orphans in Melville's Moby-Dick and Israel Potter, the rebellious slaves in the work of Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, the citizens afflicted with amnesia in Lincoln's speeches, and the dispossessed sons in slave narratives all provide dissenting voices that provoke insurrectionary plots and counter-memories. Viewed here as a miscegenation of stories, the narrative of "America" resists being told of an intelligible story of uncontested descent. National identity rests not on rituals of consensus but on repressed legacies of parricide and rebellion. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.

Cover image for Fathering the Nation, isbn: 9780520311831

T. V. Reed

Fifteen Jugglers, Five Believers

$23.95

T. V. Reed urges an affiliation between literary theory and political action—and between political action and literary theory. What can the "new literary theory" learn from "new social movements," and what can social activists learn from poststructuralism, new historicism, feminist theory, and neomarxism?

In striking interpretations of texts in four different genres—James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, and the ecofeminist Women's Pentagon Actions of the early 1980s—Reed shows how reading literary texts for their political strategies and reading political movements as texts can help us overcome certain rhetorical traps that have undermined American efforts to combat racism, sexism, and economic inequality.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.

Cover image for Fifteen Jugglers, Five Believers, isbn: 9780520309951

Steven Gilbar

Natural State

$30.95

This is the first anthology of nature writing that celebrates California, the most geographically diverse state in the union. Readers—be they naturalists or armchair explorers—will find themselves transported to California's many wild places in the company of forty noted writers whose works span more than a century. Divided into sections on California's mountains, hills and valleys, deserts, coast, and elements (earth, wind, and fire), the book contains essays, diary entries, and excerpts from larger works, including fiction. As a prelude to the collection, editor Steven Gilbar presents two California Indian creation myths, one a Cahto narrative and the other an A-juma-wi story as told by Darryl Babe Wilson.

Familiar names appear in these pages—John Muir, Robert Louis Stevenson, John McPhee, M.F.K. Fisher, Gretel Ehrlich—but less familiar writers such as Daniel Duane, Margaret Millar, and John McKinney are also included. Among the gems in this treasure trove are Jack Kerouac on climbing Mt. Matterhorn, Barry Lopez on snow geese migration at Tule Lake, Edward Abbey on Death Valley, Henry Miller on Big Sur, and Joan Didion on the Santa Ana winds. Gary Snyder's inspiring Afterword reflects the spirit of environmentalism that runs throughout the book. Natural State also reveals the many changes to California's landscape that have occurred in geological time and in human terms. More than a book of "nature writing," this book is superb writing about nature.

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James D. Hart

The Popular Book

$29.95

The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste by James D. Hart traces how ordinary readers across four centuries have shaped, and been shaped by, what they read. Beginning with the utilitarian choices of the Mayflower settlers, Hart follows the growth of a reading public that consumed everything from psalm books, almanacs, and captivity narratives to sentimental novels, Gothic romances, and practical manuals. He reveals how America’s literary marketplace grew in tandem with shifting social, religious, and political contexts—from Puritan piety and Enlightenment rationalism to Revolutionary pamphleteering, the sentimentalism of the early republic, and the rise of mass-market fiction. Through detailed case studies of best sellers like Pilgrim’s Progress, Common Sense, Charlotte Temple, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the book demonstrates how popular texts mirrored and molded cultural values.

Far from a simple chronology of American letters, Hart’s work situates literature within the everyday life of communities, households, and circulating libraries, emphasizing how reading habits illuminate broader cultural transformations. By examining probate inventories, publishers’ invoices, and anecdotal evidence, he uncovers the texture of ordinary literary experience and challenges traditional hierarchies of taste. The Popular Book ultimately presents a vivid cultural history of how Americans—from colonial settlers to nineteenth-century consumers—defined themselves through what they chose to read, offering essential insights into the dynamics of literary popularity and the evolving relationship between print and public.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1950.

Cover image for The Popular Book, isbn: 9780520327078

Mark Twain

Mark Twain's Correspondence with Henry Huttleston Rogers, 1893-1909

$84.00

This collection of correspondence between Clemens and Rogers may be thought of as a continuation of Mark Twain's Letters to His Publishers, 1867-1894, edited by Hamlin Hill. It completes the story begun there of Samuel Clemens's business affairs, especially insofar as they concern dealings with publishers; and it documents Clemens's progress from financial disaster, with the Paige typesetter and Webster & Company, to renewed prosperity under the steady, skillful hand of H. H. Rogers. But Clemens’s correspondence with Rogers reveals more than a business relationship. It illuminates a friendship which Clemens came to value above all others, and it suggests a profound change in his patterns of living. He who during the Hartford years had been a devoted family man, content with a discrete circle of intimates, now became again (as he had been during the Nevada and California years) a man among sporting men, enjoying prizefights and professional billiard matches in public, and—in private—long days of poker, gruff jest, and good Scotch whisky aboard Rogers’s magnificent yacht.

Cover image for Mark Twain's Correspondence with Henry Huttleston Rogers, 1893-1909, isbn: 9780520905061

Jeffrey Steinbrink

Getting to be Mark Twain

$23.95

Mark Twain is one of our most accessible cultural icons, a figure familiar to virtually every American and renowned internationally. But he was not always as we know him today. Mark Twain began life as a loose gathering of postures, attitudes, and voices in the mind of Samuel Clemens. It was some time before he took full possession of the personality the world now recognizes.

This is the story of the coming of age of Mark Twain. It begins in 1867, with Clemens stepping off the steamship Quaker City and almost immediately declaring himself "in a fidget to move." It comes to a close in 1871, with Clemens settling in Hartford. Mark Twain was substantially formed during the intervening years, as Clemens came East, gained fame and fortune with the publication of Innocents Abroad, courted and married Olivia Langdon, and established himself as a professional writer. Each of these steps represented a profound change in the former Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope as he sifted through the elements in his personality and began to assume the qualities we now associate with him. The tale that unfolds here shows how, through that process, the Mark Twain of the late 1860s became the Mark Twain of all time.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.

Mark Twain

Mark Twain's Fables of Man

$84.00

For years, many of Twain’s philosophical, religious, and historical fantasies concerning the nature and condition of humanity remained unpublished. Thirty-six of these writings make their first appearance here.

For years, many of Twain’s philosophical, religious, and historical fantasies concerning the nature and condition of humanity remained unpublished. Thirty-six of these writings make their first appearance here.

Cover image for Mark Twain's Fables of Man, isbn: 9780520905214

Arturo Serrano-Plaja

Magic Realism in Cervantes

$23.95

"Magic" Realism in Cervantes: Don Quixote as Seen Through Tom Sawyer and The Idiot explores the enduring impact of Cervantes' Don Quixote through the works of Mark Twain and Fyodor Dostoevsky. The essay draws on the author's conversations with Ernest Hemingway about the significance of Mark Twain, highlighting parallels between Twain's protagonists and Cervantes' iconic knight-errant. The thesis asserts that Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, as well as Dostoevsky's The Idiot, extend Cervantes’ world rather than merely comment on it. These works, through characters like a child and an “idiot,” delve into themes of sincerity, play, and the human condition. The essay suggests that Don Quixote’s actions—whether deeply earnest or whimsically playful—reflect a profound engagement with life, not mockery, as earlier interpretations have suggested.

Building on Ortega y Gasset’s philosophical inquiries about the ambiguity of Don Quixote, the study proposes a fresh perspective by examining the "descendants" of Cervantes' creation in Twain and Dostoevsky. It posits that Cervantes' masterpiece is a "game of life," blending the serious with the playful, and transcending traditional narrative boundaries. By viewing Don Quixote through the lens of Twain's childlike adventurers and Dostoevsky's tragic hero, the essay uncovers a deeper understanding of Cervantes’ intentions, affirming that his work is less a satire and more a celebration of the paradoxes of human existence—an interplay of earnestness and imagination, where life itself becomes both dream and play.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1970.

Cover image for Magic Realism in Cervantes, isbn: 9780520338029

Mark Twain

Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians

$23.95

o Includes the authoritative texts for eleven pieces written between 1868 and 1902

o Publishes, for the first time, the complete text of "Villagers of 1840-3," Mark Twain's astounding feat of memory

o Features a biographical directory and notes that reflect extensive new research on Mark Twain's early life in Missouri

Throughout his career, Mark Twain frequently turned for inspiration to memories of his youth in the Mississippi River town of Hannibal, Missouri. What has come to be known as the Matter of Hannibal inspired two of his most famous books, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and provided the basis for the eleven pieces reprinted here. Most of these selections (eight of them fiction and three of them autobiographical) were never completed, and all were left unpublished. Written between 1868 and 1902, they include a diverse assortment of adventures, satires, and reminiscences in which the characters of his own childhood and of his best-loved fiction, particularly Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, come alive again. The autobiographical recollections culminate in an astounding feat of memory titled "Villagers of 1840-3" in which the author, writing for himself alone at the age of sixty-one, recalls with humor and pathos the characters of some one hundred and fifty people from his childhood. Accompanied by notes that reflect extensive new research on Mark Twain's early life in Missouri, the selections in this volume offer a revealing view of Mark Twain's varied and repeated attempts to give literary expression to the Matter of Hannibal.

Cover image for Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians, isbn: 9780520950603

Robert W. Kirk with Marvin Klotz

Faulkner's People

$95.00

Faulkner's People is an essential reference for the student and general reader of Faulkner who seeks guidance in identifying and interrelating the more than 1,200 characters in Faulkner’s novels, short stories, and sketches. The book will help even experienced readers make their way through the labyrinth of Faulkner’s style and plots and distinguish the interconnections between all of Faulkner’s writings.

The guide is constructed as follows: The novels from Soldiers’ Pay (1926) to The Reivers (1962) are listed by title in the order of their publication. Under each title, all of the named characters who appear or are mentioned in the work are listed alphabetically, together with the number of every page on which the character’s name occurs. A concise account of the actions of each character is given, together with a description of that character’s salient personality features. The name under which a character is listed in the guide is often supplied in brackets when a nickname, maiden name, or other variant is used in the sketches. Major characters in each novel are indicated by boldface type.

Immediately following the section devoted to the novels appear the named characters in all of Faulkner’s short stories and sketches, which are also treated in the order of their publication. Carryover characters who are handled inconsistently by Faulkner are marked with an asterisk and treated further by the authors in the appendix.

The authors have also included genealogical charts of the Sartoris, Burden, and McCaslin-Beauchamp-Edmonds families, as well as a map of Yoknapatawpha County. Finally, an alphabetically arranged master index of characters lists every work in which their names occur. Specific bibliographical information concerning editions is given, together with other editions, American and British, with the same pagination.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1963.

Blake Nevius

Edith Wharton

$95.00

Blake Nevius’s close analysis and appraisal of Edith Wharton’s novels and stories reveals the modernity of her fiction and shows why she should have a permanent claim on our attention. Wharton is the only American novelist who has dealt successfully and at length with the remains of traditional New York society, which barely survived the beginning of the twentieth century. She illuminated, as no other novelist of her generation was able to do, a major aspect of U.S. social history through the dramatic conflict between the ideals of the old mercantile and the new industrial societies. Nevius also argues that Wharton, next to Henry James, is our most successful novelist of manners and, along with him, helped preserve the artistic dignity of the novel

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1953.

Ruben Salazar

Border Correspondent

$95.00

This first major collection of former Los Angeles Times reporter and columnist Ruben Salazar's writings, is a testament to his pioneering role in the Mexican American community, in journalism, and in the evolution of race relations in the U.S. Taken together, the articles serve as a documentary history of the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and of the changing perspective of the nation as a whole.

Since his tragic death while covering the massive Chicano antiwar moratorium in Los Angeles on August 29, 1970, Ruben Salazar has become a legend in the Chicano community. As a reporter and later as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, Salazar was the first journalist of Mexican American background to cross over into the mainstream English-language press. He wrote extensively on the Mexican American community and served as a foreign correspondent in Latin America and Vietnam. This first major collection of Salazar's writing is a testament to his pioneering role in the Mexican American community, in journalism, and in the evolution of race relations in the United States. Taken together, the articles serve as a documentary history of the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and of the changing perspective of the nation as a whole.

Border Correspondent presents selections from each period of Salazar's career. The stories and columns document a growing frustration with the Kennedy administration, a young César Chávez beginning to organize farm workers, the Vietnam War, and conflict between police and community in East Los Angeles. One of the first to take investigative journalism into the streets and jails, Salazar's first-hand accounts of his experiences with drug users and police, ordinary people and criminals, make compelling reading.

Mario García's introduction provides a biographical sketch of Salazar and situates him in the context of American journalism and Chicano history.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.

Edited by Brom Weber

The Letters of Hart Crane, 1916-1932

$95.00

The Letters of Hart Crane: 1916-1932 provides an intimate portrait of one of America's most enigmatic and revered poets. Edited with care and insight, this collection showcases the rich emotional and intellectual landscape that defined Hart Crane's life and works. Known for his intense lyricism and ambitious poetic vision, Crane's correspondence reveals the same passionate drive for expression that animated his poetry. From letters to close friends like Gorham Munson and Waldo Frank to heartfelt, complex exchanges with his parents, these writings document Crane's artistic journey, personal struggles, and relentless pursuit of connection. The letters reflect not only the creative mind behind The Bridge but also the vulnerabilities and challenges that shaped his tumultuous life.

This collection is more than a historical record; it’s an exploration of the dynamic interplay between Crane's personal experiences and his poetic output. Through his correspondence, readers gain insight into the profound emotional impulses that drove his work, including his deep need for affection, his struggles with self-doubt, and his moments of creative triumph. Supplemented by meticulous editorial notes and a thoughtful chronology of his life, The Letters of Hart Crane offers a window into the heart and mind of a poet whose legacy continues to resonate, making it an essential resource for scholars and admirers of modern American poetry alike.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1952.

Leon Howard

Herman Melville

$49.95

Herman Melville: A Biography offers an in-depth exploration of the life and literary genius of the author behind Moby-Dick. Rooted in extensive research and collaboration, this biography provides a nuanced narrative of Melville’s life, contextualizing his experiences within the broader intellectual, cultural, and historical landscapes of 19th-century America. The book draws heavily on Jay Leyda’s groundbreaking Melville Log, combining the rigor of archival discoveries with a narrative that seeks to humanize the author. By emphasizing the relationship between Melville’s life events and his literary creations, the biography aims to restore the humanity often obscured in discussions of his works, revealing the motivations, influences, and processes that shaped his remarkable oeuvre.

This biography distinguishes itself by not only recounting Melville’s life but also treating his books as pivotal events within it. It examines how his personal experiences, literary inspirations, and creative struggles coalesced into the masterpieces that have stood the test of time. With a meticulous approach to documentation and inference, the book uncovers new insights into Melville’s life, from his travels and financial struggles to the inspirations behind his autobiographical works. Rich in collaboration and drawing on the expertise of leading Melville scholars, this biography serves as an invaluable resource for understanding one of America’s most enduring literary figures, bridging the gap between Melville’s humanity and his towering literary legacy.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1967.

Charles Moorman

Arthurian Triptych

$39.95

The use of myth in literature serves as a powerful tool for modern poets and critics to bring order and meaning to the chaos of contemporary life. Emerging in response to the fragmented and disillusioned ethos of the twentieth century, myth offers a structured and symbolic framework that poets like Yeats, Eliot, and Auden have employed to reconcile their disordered world with timeless archetypes. Unlike illustrative metaphors that clarify by comparison, the sacramental use of myth integrates symbol and object, imbuing the poem with layered complexity and drawing on the rich connotations of shared cultural narratives. This approach requires an act of faith from both poet and reader: the poet must embed myth as a dynamic referent, and the reader must engage with its inherent symbolic depth, enriching the experience of the poem. By invoking myth as a "stockpile of common imagery," poets connect their personal visions to a broader, universal order, transforming chaotic individual experiences into coherent artistic expressions. As T.S. Eliot famously remarked regarding Ulysses, myth provides a method of "controlling, ordering, and giving significance" to the otherwise futile and anarchic panorama of modern history, reaffirming its value as a vital artistic and critical strategy.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1960.

Charles Moorman

Arthurian Triptych

$95.00

The use of myth in literature serves as a powerful tool for modern poets and critics to bring order and meaning to the chaos of contemporary life. Emerging in response to the fragmented and disillusioned ethos of the twentieth century, myth offers a structured and symbolic framework that poets like Yeats, Eliot, and Auden have employed to reconcile their disordered world with timeless archetypes. Unlike illustrative metaphors that clarify by comparison, the sacramental use of myth integrates symbol and object, imbuing the poem with layered complexity and drawing on the rich connotations of shared cultural narratives. This approach requires an act of faith from both poet and reader: the poet must embed myth as a dynamic referent, and the reader must engage with its inherent symbolic depth, enriching the experience of the poem. By invoking myth as a "stockpile of common imagery," poets connect their personal visions to a broader, universal order, transforming chaotic individual experiences into coherent artistic expressions. As T.S. Eliot famously remarked regarding Ulysses, myth provides a method of "controlling, ordering, and giving significance" to the otherwise futile and anarchic panorama of modern history, reaffirming its value as a vital artistic and critical strategy.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1960.

John E. Jordan

Why the Lyrical Ballads?

$39.95

Why the Lyrical Ballads? illuminates the background, making, and distinctive character of Wordsworth’s 1798 experiment by tracking a recurrent “common resonance” across poems, prefaces, and critical contexts. John E. Jordan’s lucid study resists a single, neat thesis; instead it pursues the book’s many “why’s”—why simplicity, why ballad form, why ordinary lives—and shows how they converge on Wordsworth’s drive to universalize experience. Using the famous “sense sublime” passage from Tintern Abbey as a reflective lens (while pointedly treating the poem as a late, framing add-on to the first edition), Jordan locates the poet’s commitment to permanence: “elementary feelings,” “durable” manners, and language adequate to “the mind of man.” He follows Wordsworth’s self-declared aim to make poetry “the history or science of feelings,” clarifying the poet’s paradox: passion rendered with the objectivity and communicability of a record, even as language strains toward what feels incommunicable. The result is a compelling portrait of a project that eschews topicality for the typical, elevates the everyday through “various commonality,” and seeks joy—not sentimentality—as the connective tissue between individual life and the one “great Life.”

Jordan’s chapters map how this universalizing impulse shapes form and method: the ballad’s lyric-narrative braid; an ethics of empathy that draws readers into Betty Foy, Goody Blake, and the “Idiot Boy” without condescension; and a prosody that aspires to “elevated thoughts” in “superior metrics.” Along the way, the book re-situates Wordsworth among contemporaries (novel yet not idiosyncratic), engages the 1800/1802 Prefaces, and parses the poet’s abiding anxiety over the “deficiencies of language.” Why the Lyrical Ballads? will reward scholars and students of Romanticism, poetics, and intellectual history who want a precise account of how a revolutionary volume made the ordinary intelligible—and memorable—by turning feeling into form without sacrificing the universality that gives it lasting power.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.

Louis and Esther Mertins

The Intervals of Robert Frost

$39.95

The Intervals of Robert Frost: A Critical Bibliography by Louis and Esther Mertins is an illuminating exploration of the enduring friendship between the celebrated poet Robert Frost and collector Louis Mertins. This fascinating book chronicles the creation and growth of the Mertins collection—a treasure trove of Frost's manuscripts, first editions, and annotated works. It offers readers an intimate glimpse into the poet’s life, creative process, and the personal connections that shaped his legacy. Beginning with the gift of Frost’s iconic manuscript Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening in 1932, this partnership blossomed into a lifelong collaboration, marked by annual exchanges of literary gifts and personal notes.

Richly detailed, this critical bibliography provides a unique perspective on Frost's work and the meticulous efforts behind building one of the most significant collections of his materials. From visits to Frost’s farms in New Hampshire and Vermont to the careful assembly of periodicals featuring his earliest published poems, the Mertins' dedication shines through. Complete with annotated insights from Frost himself, this book is an indispensable resource for fans of the poet, scholars of American literature, and collectors alike. Set against the stunning backdrop of California's San Bernardino Valley, where the collection found its temporary home, this work captures both the literary and personal dimensions of one of America’s greatest poets.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1947.

John E. Jordan

Why the Lyrical Ballads?

$95.00

Why the Lyrical Ballads? illuminates the background, making, and distinctive character of Wordsworth’s 1798 experiment by tracking a recurrent “common resonance” across poems, prefaces, and critical contexts. John E. Jordan’s lucid study resists a single, neat thesis; instead it pursues the book’s many “why’s”—why simplicity, why ballad form, why ordinary lives—and shows how they converge on Wordsworth’s drive to universalize experience. Using the famous “sense sublime” passage from Tintern Abbey as a reflective lens (while pointedly treating the poem as a late, framing add-on to the first edition), Jordan locates the poet’s commitment to permanence: “elementary feelings,” “durable” manners, and language adequate to “the mind of man.” He follows Wordsworth’s self-declared aim to make poetry “the history or science of feelings,” clarifying the poet’s paradox: passion rendered with the objectivity and communicability of a record, even as language strains toward what feels incommunicable. The result is a compelling portrait of a project that eschews topicality for the typical, elevates the everyday through “various commonality,” and seeks joy—not sentimentality—as the connective tissue between individual life and the one “great Life.”

Jordan’s chapters map how this universalizing impulse shapes form and method: the ballad’s lyric-narrative braid; an ethics of empathy that draws readers into Betty Foy, Goody Blake, and the “Idiot Boy” without condescension; and a prosody that aspires to “elevated thoughts” in “superior metrics.” Along the way, the book re-situates Wordsworth among contemporaries (novel yet not idiosyncratic), engages the 1800/1802 Prefaces, and parses the poet’s abiding anxiety over the “deficiencies of language.” Why the Lyrical Ballads? will reward scholars and students of Romanticism, poetics, and intellectual history who want a precise account of how a revolutionary volume made the ordinary intelligible—and memorable—by turning feeling into form without sacrificing the universality that gives it lasting power.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.

Louis and Esther Mertins

The Intervals of Robert Frost

$95.00

The Intervals of Robert Frost: A Critical Bibliography by Louis and Esther Mertins is an illuminating exploration of the enduring friendship between the celebrated poet Robert Frost and collector Louis Mertins. This fascinating book chronicles the creation and growth of the Mertins collection—a treasure trove of Frost's manuscripts, first editions, and annotated works. It offers readers an intimate glimpse into the poet’s life, creative process, and the personal connections that shaped his legacy. Beginning with the gift of Frost’s iconic manuscript Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening in 1932, this partnership blossomed into a lifelong collaboration, marked by annual exchanges of literary gifts and personal notes.

Richly detailed, this critical bibliography provides a unique perspective on Frost's work and the meticulous efforts behind building one of the most significant collections of his materials. From visits to Frost’s farms in New Hampshire and Vermont to the careful assembly of periodicals featuring his earliest published poems, the Mertins' dedication shines through. Complete with annotated insights from Frost himself, this book is an indispensable resource for fans of the poet, scholars of American literature, and collectors alike. Set against the stunning backdrop of California's San Bernardino Valley, where the collection found its temporary home, this work captures both the literary and personal dimensions of one of America’s greatest poets.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1947.

Jeffrey Steinbrink

Getting to be Mark Twain

$95.00

Mark Twain is one of our most accessible cultural icons, a figure familiar to virtually every American and renowned internationally. But he was not always as we know him today. Mark Twain began life as a loose gathering of postures, attitudes, and voices in the mind of Samuel Clemens. It was some time before he took full possession of the personality the world now recognizes.

This is the story of the coming of age of Mark Twain. It begins in 1867, with Clemens stepping off the steamship Quaker City and almost immediately declaring himself "in a fidget to move." It comes to a close in 1871, with Clemens settling in Hartford. Mark Twain was substantially formed during the intervening years, as Clemens came East, gained fame and fortune with the publication of Innocents Abroad, courted and married Olivia Langdon, and established himself as a professional writer. Each of these steps represented a profound change in the former Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope as he sifted through the elements in his personality and began to assume the qualities we now associate with him. The tale that unfolds here shows how, through that process, the Mark Twain of the late 1860s became the Mark Twain of all time.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.

Jeffrey Steinbrink

Getting to be Mark Twain

$39.95

Mark Twain is one of our most accessible cultural icons, a figure familiar to virtually every American and renowned internationally. But he was not always as we know him today. Mark Twain began life as a loose gathering of postures, attitudes, and voices in the mind of Samuel Clemens. It was some time before he took full possession of the personality the world now recognizes.

This is the story of the coming of age of Mark Twain. It begins in 1867, with Clemens stepping off the steamship Quaker City and almost immediately declaring himself "in a fidget to move." It comes to a close in 1871, with Clemens settling in Hartford. Mark Twain was substantially formed during the intervening years, as Clemens came East, gained fame and fortune with the publication of Innocents Abroad, courted and married Olivia Langdon, and established himself as a professional writer. Each of these steps represented a profound change in the former Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope as he sifted through the elements in his personality and began to assume the qualities we now associate with him. The tale that unfolds here shows how, through that process, the Mark Twain of the late 1860s became the Mark Twain of all time.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.

Marilyn R. Chandler

Dwelling in the Text

$49.95

What is a house? And what can architecture tell us about individual psychology, national character and aspiration? The house holds a central place in American mythology, as Marilyn Chandler demonstrates in a series of "house tours" through American novels, beginning with Thoreau's Walden and ending with Toni Morrison's Beloved and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping.

Chandler illuminates the complex analogies between house and psyche, house and family, house and social environment, and house and text. She traces a historical path from settlement to unsettledness in American culture and explores all the rituals in between: of building, decorating, inhabiting, and abandoning houses. She notes the ambivalence between our desire for rootedness and our romanticization of wide open spaces, relating these poles to the tension between materialism and spirituality in our national character.

At a time when housing has become a problem of unprecedented dimensions in America, this look at the place of houses and homes in the American imagination reveals some sources of the attitudes, assumptions, and expectations that underlie the designing and building of the homes we buy, sell, and dream about.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.

Marilyn R. Chandler

Dwelling in the Text

$95.00

What is a house? And what can architecture tell us about individual psychology, national character and aspiration? The house holds a central place in American mythology, as Marilyn Chandler demonstrates in a series of "house tours" through American novels, beginning with Thoreau's Walden and ending with Toni Morrison's Beloved and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping.

Chandler illuminates the complex analogies between house and psyche, house and family, house and social environment, and house and text. She traces a historical path from settlement to unsettledness in American culture and explores all the rituals in between: of building, decorating, inhabiting, and abandoning houses. She notes the ambivalence between our desire for rootedness and our romanticization of wide open spaces, relating these poles to the tension between materialism and spirituality in our national character.

At a time when housing has become a problem of unprecedented dimensions in America, this look at the place of houses and homes in the American imagination reveals some sources of the attitudes, assumptions, and expectations that underlie the designing and building of the homes we buy, sell, and dream about.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.

Edited by Brom Weber

The Letters of Hart Crane, 1916-1932

$49.95

The Letters of Hart Crane: 1916-1932 provides an intimate portrait of one of America's most enigmatic and revered poets. Edited with care and insight, this collection showcases the rich emotional and intellectual landscape that defined Hart Crane's life and works. Known for his intense lyricism and ambitious poetic vision, Crane's correspondence reveals the same passionate drive for expression that animated his poetry. From letters to close friends like Gorham Munson and Waldo Frank to heartfelt, complex exchanges with his parents, these writings document Crane's artistic journey, personal struggles, and relentless pursuit of connection. The letters reflect not only the creative mind behind The Bridge but also the vulnerabilities and challenges that shaped his tumultuous life.

This collection is more than a historical record; it’s an exploration of the dynamic interplay between Crane's personal experiences and his poetic output. Through his correspondence, readers gain insight into the profound emotional impulses that drove his work, including his deep need for affection, his struggles with self-doubt, and his moments of creative triumph. Supplemented by meticulous editorial notes and a thoughtful chronology of his life, The Letters of Hart Crane offers a window into the heart and mind of a poet whose legacy continues to resonate, making it an essential resource for scholars and admirers of modern American poetry alike.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1952.

Peter Makin

Provence and Pound

$49.95

Provence and Pound offers a compelling exploration of the relationship between Ezra Pound and the tradition of Provençal poetry. Bridging centuries and cultures, the book examines how Pound—one of the most influential modernist poets—engaged with the medieval troubadours of 12th-century Provence, whose refined lyricism and courtly ideals shaped his understanding of poetic form, rhythm, and artistry. The troubadours, renowned for their mastery of the canso and other verse forms, created a literary culture that Pound saw as vibrant, organic, and deeply influential in the evolution of European poetics. By tracing his engagement with Provençal poetry, this study not only sheds light on Pound’s poetic evolution but also challenges traditional interpretations of the troubadour legacy.

The book positions Pound as a revisionist scholar of the troubadours, one who bypassed the rigorous philological traditions of Provençal studies in favor of a more intuitive and artistic approach. While his grasp of Provençal language may have been imprecise, his ability to distill the essential spirit of the troubadour ethos allowed him to reinvigorate their influence for a modern audience. The discussion also reveals how Pound’s fascination with figures like Bertran de Born evolved over time, reflecting his shifting perspectives on poetry, politics, and aesthetics. By placing the medieval and the modern in direct conversation, Provence and Pound highlights the enduring power of the troubadours and underscores Pound’s singular role in resurrecting their legacy within the avant-garde movements of the 20th century.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.

Peter Makin

Provence and Pound

$95.00

Provence and Pound offers a compelling exploration of the relationship between Ezra Pound and the tradition of Provençal poetry. Bridging centuries and cultures, the book examines how Pound—one of the most influential modernist poets—engaged with the medieval troubadours of 12th-century Provence, whose refined lyricism and courtly ideals shaped his understanding of poetic form, rhythm, and artistry. The troubadours, renowned for their mastery of the canso and other verse forms, created a literary culture that Pound saw as vibrant, organic, and deeply influential in the evolution of European poetics. By tracing his engagement with Provençal poetry, this study not only sheds light on Pound’s poetic evolution but also challenges traditional interpretations of the troubadour legacy.

The book positions Pound as a revisionist scholar of the troubadours, one who bypassed the rigorous philological traditions of Provençal studies in favor of a more intuitive and artistic approach. While his grasp of Provençal language may have been imprecise, his ability to distill the essential spirit of the troubadour ethos allowed him to reinvigorate their influence for a modern audience. The discussion also reveals how Pound’s fascination with figures like Bertran de Born evolved over time, reflecting his shifting perspectives on poetry, politics, and aesthetics. By placing the medieval and the modern in direct conversation, Provence and Pound highlights the enduring power of the troubadours and underscores Pound’s singular role in resurrecting their legacy within the avant-garde movements of the 20th century.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.

Leon Howard

Herman Melville

$95.00

Herman Melville: A Biography offers an in-depth exploration of the life and literary genius of the author behind Moby-Dick. Rooted in extensive research and collaboration, this biography provides a nuanced narrative of Melville’s life, contextualizing his experiences within the broader intellectual, cultural, and historical landscapes of 19th-century America. The book draws heavily on Jay Leyda’s groundbreaking Melville Log, combining the rigor of archival discoveries with a narrative that seeks to humanize the author. By emphasizing the relationship between Melville’s life events and his literary creations, the biography aims to restore the humanity often obscured in discussions of his works, revealing the motivations, influences, and processes that shaped his remarkable oeuvre.

This biography distinguishes itself by not only recounting Melville’s life but also treating his books as pivotal events within it. It examines how his personal experiences, literary inspirations, and creative struggles coalesced into the masterpieces that have stood the test of time. With a meticulous approach to documentation and inference, the book uncovers new insights into Melville’s life, from his travels and financial struggles to the inspirations behind his autobiographical works. Rich in collaboration and drawing on the expertise of leading Melville scholars, this biography serves as an invaluable resource for understanding one of America’s most enduring literary figures, bridging the gap between Melville’s humanity and his towering literary legacy.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1967.

James D. Hart

The Popular Book

$49.95

The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste by James D. Hart traces how ordinary readers across four centuries have shaped, and been shaped by, what they read. Beginning with the utilitarian choices of the Mayflower settlers, Hart follows the growth of a reading public that consumed everything from psalm books, almanacs, and captivity narratives to sentimental novels, Gothic romances, and practical manuals. He reveals how America’s literary marketplace grew in tandem with shifting social, religious, and political contexts—from Puritan piety and Enlightenment rationalism to Revolutionary pamphleteering, the sentimentalism of the early republic, and the rise of mass-market fiction. Through detailed case studies of best sellers like Pilgrim’s Progress, Common Sense, Charlotte Temple, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the book demonstrates how popular texts mirrored and molded cultural values.

Far from a simple chronology of American letters, Hart’s work situates literature within the everyday life of communities, households, and circulating libraries, emphasizing how reading habits illuminate broader cultural transformations. By examining probate inventories, publishers’ invoices, and anecdotal evidence, he uncovers the texture of ordinary literary experience and challenges traditional hierarchies of taste. The Popular Book ultimately presents a vivid cultural history of how Americans—from colonial settlers to nineteenth-century consumers—defined themselves through what they chose to read, offering essential insights into the dynamics of literary popularity and the evolving relationship between print and public.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1950.

Edited by William David Schaefer

The Speedy Extinction of Evil and Misery

$49.95

The Speedy Extinction of Evil and Misery: Selected Prose of James Thomson (B.V.), edited by William David Schaefer, offers the first truly representative collection of Thomson’s prose, rescuing a neglected body of work from obscurity and scattered editions. While Thomson’s poetry—most notably The City of Dreadful Night—has ensured him a place in Victorian literature, his prose has long remained inaccessible, surviving mainly in rare volumes or ephemeral periodicals such as the National Reformer, the Secularist, and Cope’s Tobacco Plant. Previous collections, whether Bertram Dobell’s ill-chosen Biographical and Critical Studies or Foote’s narrowly focused Satires and Profanities, presented only partial and often misleading portraits of Thomson’s achievement. By gathering sixteen previously uncollected writings with sixteen of his strongest earlier pieces, Schaefer creates a comprehensive edition that illuminates the full range of Thomson’s secularist satire, social criticism, literary essays, and prose phantasies.

The volume situates Thomson within the turbulent intellectual climate of nineteenth-century free thought and secular radicalism, highlighting his evolution from Christian-influenced idealist to uncompromising atheist and cultural pessimist. Thomson’s caustic critiques of religion and society, his meditations on literature from Blake and Shelley to Leopardi and Whitman, and his haunting imaginative prose works reveal a writer both steeped in Victorian debates and profoundly ahead of his time. Schaefer’s editorial arrangement—grouping the texts by theme while providing historical notes—underscores the coherence of Thomson’s intellectual development while preserving the diversity of his prose forms. More than a supplement to his poetry, this collection establishes Thomson’s prose as a vital expression of Victorian radical thought and a compelling record of one man’s struggle with faith, art, and the human condition.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1967.

Edited by William David Schaefer

The Speedy Extinction of Evil and Misery

$95.00

The Speedy Extinction of Evil and Misery: Selected Prose of James Thomson (B.V.), edited by William David Schaefer, offers the first truly representative collection of Thomson’s prose, rescuing a neglected body of work from obscurity and scattered editions. While Thomson’s poetry—most notably The City of Dreadful Night—has ensured him a place in Victorian literature, his prose has long remained inaccessible, surviving mainly in rare volumes or ephemeral periodicals such as the National Reformer, the Secularist, and Cope’s Tobacco Plant. Previous collections, whether Bertram Dobell’s ill-chosen Biographical and Critical Studies or Foote’s narrowly focused Satires and Profanities, presented only partial and often misleading portraits of Thomson’s achievement. By gathering sixteen previously uncollected writings with sixteen of his strongest earlier pieces, Schaefer creates a comprehensive edition that illuminates the full range of Thomson’s secularist satire, social criticism, literary essays, and prose phantasies.

The volume situates Thomson within the turbulent intellectual climate of nineteenth-century free thought and secular radicalism, highlighting his evolution from Christian-influenced idealist to uncompromising atheist and cultural pessimist. Thomson’s caustic critiques of religion and society, his meditations on literature from Blake and Shelley to Leopardi and Whitman, and his haunting imaginative prose works reveal a writer both steeped in Victorian debates and profoundly ahead of his time. Schaefer’s editorial arrangement—grouping the texts by theme while providing historical notes—underscores the coherence of Thomson’s intellectual development while preserving the diversity of his prose forms. More than a supplement to his poetry, this collection establishes Thomson’s prose as a vital expression of Victorian radical thought and a compelling record of one man’s struggle with faith, art, and the human condition.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1967.

Gerald Nelson

Changes of Heart

$39.95

Changes of Heart: A Study of the Poetry of W. H. Auden delves into the significant evolution in Auden's poetic voice and persona, particularly during and after the turbulent 1940s. This period saw Auden facing criticism from contemporaries like Randall Jarrell and Joseph Warren Beach, who accused him of betraying his liberal commitments and losing coherence in his poetic craft. As Auden transitioned to a more introspective, Christian-inspired worldview, his poetry reflected this shift through complex long poems that seemed, at first glance, diffuse and uncertain. This study challenges earlier dismissive critiques by exploring the deeper trajectory of Auden’s poetic development and his search for a new persona—a "mask" that could humanize and convey his evolving metaphysical and moral perspectives.

The book examines Auden's persona as the pivotal element bridging poet and reader, offering insight into his thematic and stylistic transformation. By analyzing both his dramatic and nondramatic works, it highlights how Auden redefined his poetic voice to align with his maturing beliefs, culminating in later masterpieces such as The Shield of Achilles. This dual exploration not only tracks the emergence of Auden’s refined poetic identity in the 1950s but also investigates how this new "mask" shaped his poetry's impact and reception, underscoring a deliberate and significant evolution rather than the perceived decline posited by earlier critics.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1969.

Gerald Nelson

Changes of Heart

$95.00

Changes of Heart: A Study of the Poetry of W. H. Auden delves into the significant evolution in Auden's poetic voice and persona, particularly during and after the turbulent 1940s. This period saw Auden facing criticism from contemporaries like Randall Jarrell and Joseph Warren Beach, who accused him of betraying his liberal commitments and losing coherence in his poetic craft. As Auden transitioned to a more introspective, Christian-inspired worldview, his poetry reflected this shift through complex long poems that seemed, at first glance, diffuse and uncertain. This study challenges earlier dismissive critiques by exploring the deeper trajectory of Auden’s poetic development and his search for a new persona—a "mask" that could humanize and convey his evolving metaphysical and moral perspectives.

The book examines Auden's persona as the pivotal element bridging poet and reader, offering insight into his thematic and stylistic transformation. By analyzing both his dramatic and nondramatic works, it highlights how Auden redefined his poetic voice to align with his maturing beliefs, culminating in later masterpieces such as The Shield of Achilles. This dual exploration not only tracks the emergence of Auden’s refined poetic identity in the 1950s but also investigates how this new "mask" shaped his poetry's impact and reception, underscoring a deliberate and significant evolution rather than the perceived decline posited by earlier critics.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1969.

James D. Hart

The Popular Book

$95.00

The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste by James D. Hart traces how ordinary readers across four centuries have shaped, and been shaped by, what they read. Beginning with the utilitarian choices of the Mayflower settlers, Hart follows the growth of a reading public that consumed everything from psalm books, almanacs, and captivity narratives to sentimental novels, Gothic romances, and practical manuals. He reveals how America’s literary marketplace grew in tandem with shifting social, religious, and political contexts—from Puritan piety and Enlightenment rationalism to Revolutionary pamphleteering, the sentimentalism of the early republic, and the rise of mass-market fiction. Through detailed case studies of best sellers like Pilgrim’s Progress, Common Sense, Charlotte Temple, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the book demonstrates how popular texts mirrored and molded cultural values.

Far from a simple chronology of American letters, Hart’s work situates literature within the everyday life of communities, households, and circulating libraries, emphasizing how reading habits illuminate broader cultural transformations. By examining probate inventories, publishers’ invoices, and anecdotal evidence, he uncovers the texture of ordinary literary experience and challenges traditional hierarchies of taste. The Popular Book ultimately presents a vivid cultural history of how Americans—from colonial settlers to nineteenth-century consumers—defined themselves through what they chose to read, offering essential insights into the dynamics of literary popularity and the evolving relationship between print and public.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1950.

Lawrence Graver

An Obsession with Anne Frank

$39.95

Anne Frank's Diary has been acclaimed throughout the world as an indelible portrait of a gifted girl and as a remarkable document of the Holocaust. For Meyer Levin, the respected writer who helped bring the Diary to an American audience, the Jewish girl's moving story became a thirty-year obsession that altered his life and brought him heartbreaking sorrow.

Lawrence Graver's fascinating account of Meyer Levin's ordeal is a story within a story. What began as a warm collaboration between Levin and Anne's father, Otto Frank, turned into a notorious dispute that lasted several decades and included litigation and public scandal. Behind this story is another: one man's struggle with himself—as a Jew and as a writer—in postwar America. Looming over both stories is the shadow of the Holocaust and its persistent, complex presence in our lives.

Graver's book is based on hundreds of unpublished documents and on interviews with some of the Levin-Frank controversy's major participants. It illuminates important areas of American culture: publishing, law, religion, politics, and the popular media. The "Red Scare," anti-McCarthyism, and the commercial imperatives of Broadway are all players in this book, along with the assimilationist mood among many Jews and the simplistic pieties of American society in the 1950s.

Graver also examines the different and often conflicting ways that people the world over, Jewish and Gentile, wanted Anne Frank and her much-loved book to be represented. That her afterlife has in extraordinary ways taken on the shape and implications of myth makes Graver's story—and Meyer Levin's—even more compelling.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.

Thomas Parkinson

Hart Crane and Yvor Winters

$39.95

Hart Crane and Yvor Winters: Their Literary Correspondence delves into the profound yet contrasting relationship between two towering figures in 20th-century American poetry. Hart Crane, known for his bold, emotionally charged poetry and turbulent life, and Yvor Winters, a disciplined poet and critic, might seem like antithetical figures: the bohemian versus the scholar, the restless creative versus the stable family man. Yet their correspondence reveals a deeper connection through shared passion for poetry, mutual respect for each other’s work, and a significant exchange of ideas. This book explores their relationship, spanning Crane’s effusive gratitude for Winters’s critiques of The Bridge to the tensions that ultimately fractured their bond. Crane’s letters, preserved by Winters, offer an invaluable glimpse into his evolving poetics and his creative process, as well as the ways in which Winters influenced and challenged him.

The book situates this correspondence within the broader literary context of their time, illustrating how their dialogue reflects larger trends and tensions in American poetry. Crane's visionary and often chaotic approach contrasts sharply with Winters's insistence on precision and restraint, illuminating their divergent poetic philosophies. Despite their differences, both men were deeply committed to their craft, pushing the boundaries of American poetry in their own ways. Crane’s vivid, risk-taking style often verged on collapse but offered moments of breathtaking brilliance, while Winters’s disciplined, ethical poetry exuded intellectual rigor and formal mastery. By juxtaposing their lives, letters, and works, the book not only enriches our understanding of these two remarkable poets but also sheds light on the complex interplay of personality, ideology, and artistry that shapes poetic expression.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.

Thomas Parkinson

Hart Crane and Yvor Winters

$95.00

Hart Crane and Yvor Winters: Their Literary Correspondence delves into the profound yet contrasting relationship between two towering figures in 20th-century American poetry. Hart Crane, known for his bold, emotionally charged poetry and turbulent life, and Yvor Winters, a disciplined poet and critic, might seem like antithetical figures: the bohemian versus the scholar, the restless creative versus the stable family man. Yet their correspondence reveals a deeper connection through shared passion for poetry, mutual respect for each other’s work, and a significant exchange of ideas. This book explores their relationship, spanning Crane’s effusive gratitude for Winters’s critiques of The Bridge to the tensions that ultimately fractured their bond. Crane’s letters, preserved by Winters, offer an invaluable glimpse into his evolving poetics and his creative process, as well as the ways in which Winters influenced and challenged him.

The book situates this correspondence within the broader literary context of their time, illustrating how their dialogue reflects larger trends and tensions in American poetry. Crane's visionary and often chaotic approach contrasts sharply with Winters's insistence on precision and restraint, illuminating their divergent poetic philosophies. Despite their differences, both men were deeply committed to their craft, pushing the boundaries of American poetry in their own ways. Crane’s vivid, risk-taking style often verged on collapse but offered moments of breathtaking brilliance, while Winters’s disciplined, ethical poetry exuded intellectual rigor and formal mastery. By juxtaposing their lives, letters, and works, the book not only enriches our understanding of these two remarkable poets but also sheds light on the complex interplay of personality, ideology, and artistry that shapes poetic expression.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.

Arnold Krupat

The Voice in the Margin

$39.95

In its consideration of American Indian literature as a rich and exciting body of work, The Voice in the Margin invites us to broaden our notion of what a truly inclusive American literature might be, and of how it might be placed in relation to an international—a "cosmopolitan"—literary canon. The book comes at a time when the most influential national media have focused attention on the subject of the literary canon. They have made it an issue not merely of academic but of general public concern, expressing strong opinions on the subject of what the American student should or should not read as essential or core texts. Is the literary canon simply a given of tradition and history, or is it, and must it be, constantly under construction? The question remains hotly contested to the present moment.

Arnold Krupat argues that the literary expression of the indigenous peoples of the United States has claims on us to more than marginal attention. Demonstrating a firm grasp of both literary history and contemporary critical theory, he situates Indian literature, traditional and modern, in a variety of contexts and categories. His extensive knowledge of the history and current theory of ethnography recommends the book to anthropologists and folklorists as well as to students and teachers of literature, both canonical and noncanonical. The materials covered, the perspectives considered, and the learning displayed all make The Voice in the Margin a major contribution to the exciting field of contemporary cultural studies.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.

Arnold Krupat

The Voice in the Margin

$95.00

In its consideration of American Indian literature as a rich and exciting body of work, The Voice in the Margin invites us to broaden our notion of what a truly inclusive American literature might be, and of how it might be placed in relation to an international—a "cosmopolitan"—literary canon. The book comes at a time when the most influential national media have focused attention on the subject of the literary canon. They have made it an issue not merely of academic but of general public concern, expressing strong opinions on the subject of what the American student should or should not read as essential or core texts. Is the literary canon simply a given of tradition and history, or is it, and must it be, constantly under construction? The question remains hotly contested to the present moment.

Arnold Krupat argues that the literary expression of the indigenous peoples of the United States has claims on us to more than marginal attention. Demonstrating a firm grasp of both literary history and contemporary critical theory, he situates Indian literature, traditional and modern, in a variety of contexts and categories. His extensive knowledge of the history and current theory of ethnography recommends the book to anthropologists and folklorists as well as to students and teachers of literature, both canonical and noncanonical. The materials covered, the perspectives considered, and the learning displayed all make The Voice in the Margin a major contribution to the exciting field of contemporary cultural studies.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.

Jeanne Rosier Smith

Writing Tricksters

$95.00

Writing Tricksters examines the remarkable resurgence of tricksters—ubiquitous shape-shifters who dwell on borders, at crossroads, and between worlds—on the contemporary cultural and literary scene. Depicting a chaotic, multilingual world of colliding and overlapping cultures, many of America's most successful and important women writers are writing tricksters. Taking up works by Maxine Hong Kingston, Louise Erdrich, and Toni Morrison, Jeanne Rosier Smith accessibly weaves together current critical discourses on marginality, ethnicity, feminism, and folklore, illuminating a "trickster aesthetic" central to non-Western storytelling traditions and powerfully informing American literature today.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.

Jeanne Rosier Smith

Writing Tricksters

$39.95

Writing Tricksters examines the remarkable resurgence of tricksters—ubiquitous shape-shifters who dwell on borders, at crossroads, and between worlds—on the contemporary cultural and literary scene. Depicting a chaotic, multilingual world of colliding and overlapping cultures, many of America's most successful and important women writers are writing tricksters. Taking up works by Maxine Hong Kingston, Louise Erdrich, and Toni Morrison, Jeanne Rosier Smith accessibly weaves together current critical discourses on marginality, ethnicity, feminism, and folklore, illuminating a "trickster aesthetic" central to non-Western storytelling traditions and powerfully informing American literature today.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.

Mariano Azuela

Two Novels of Mexico

$39.95

Two Novels of Mexico: The Flies / The Bosses by Mariano Azuela translated by Lesley Byrd Simpson brings the founding novelist of the Mexican Revolution back to the scenes that forged his art: panic, opportunism, and moral reckoning in a society unmade by war. Written by a physician who served in Pancho Villa’s army and later chronicled its collapse, these paired novellas distill Azuela’s incomparable witness. The Flies captures, with staccato velocity and dark humor, a single night of flight from Mexico City as politicians, ex-federals, and hangers-on scramble into a hospital car, rehearsing alibis and switching loyalties as Obregón’s troops approach. The Bosses turns somber and incandescent, anatomizing caciquismo—the entrenched rule of merchant-landlord “bosses”—through the Del Llano clan’s predations and the fragile idealism of small-town victims whose lives are shattered in the wake of Madero’s murder and Huerta’s reaction. Together, the novellas map the Revolution’s moral topography: not battlefield heroics, but the everyday bargains, betrayals, and moments of courage that determine who survives and at what cost.

Simpson’s agile translation revives Azuela’s tonal range—telegraphic banter, caustic caricature, and lyrical tenderness—while clarifying the political and historical stakes for contemporary readers. In The Flies, opportunists cycle through regimes—Díaz, Madero, Huerta, Villa, Carranza—with comic ferocity; in The Bosses, Azuela’s most moving creation, the solitary intellectual Rodríguez, confronts a town owned by its parasites, and a love story flickers against encroaching catastrophe. Long overshadowed by The Underdogs, these “novels of Mexico” reward renewed attention as precise social documents and audacious works of art. They speak to enduring questions—how civic fear corrodes character, how local power deforms justice, how revolutions are lived from below—making this volume essential for readers of Latin American literature, history, and anyone seeking the human textures behind political upheaval.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1956.

Mariano Azuela

Two Novels of Mexico

$95.00

Two Novels of Mexico: The Flies / The Bosses by Mariano Azuela translated by Lesley Byrd Simpson brings the founding novelist of the Mexican Revolution back to the scenes that forged his art: panic, opportunism, and moral reckoning in a society unmade by war. Written by a physician who served in Pancho Villa’s army and later chronicled its collapse, these paired novellas distill Azuela’s incomparable witness. The Flies captures, with staccato velocity and dark humor, a single night of flight from Mexico City as politicians, ex-federals, and hangers-on scramble into a hospital car, rehearsing alibis and switching loyalties as Obregón’s troops approach. The Bosses turns somber and incandescent, anatomizing caciquismo—the entrenched rule of merchant-landlord “bosses”—through the Del Llano clan’s predations and the fragile idealism of small-town victims whose lives are shattered in the wake of Madero’s murder and Huerta’s reaction. Together, the novellas map the Revolution’s moral topography: not battlefield heroics, but the everyday bargains, betrayals, and moments of courage that determine who survives and at what cost.

Simpson’s agile translation revives Azuela’s tonal range—telegraphic banter, caustic caricature, and lyrical tenderness—while clarifying the political and historical stakes for contemporary readers. In The Flies, opportunists cycle through regimes—Díaz, Madero, Huerta, Villa, Carranza—with comic ferocity; in The Bosses, Azuela’s most moving creation, the solitary intellectual Rodríguez, confronts a town owned by its parasites, and a love story flickers against encroaching catastrophe. Long overshadowed by The Underdogs, these “novels of Mexico” reward renewed attention as precise social documents and audacious works of art. They speak to enduring questions—how civic fear corrodes character, how local power deforms justice, how revolutions are lived from below—making this volume essential for readers of Latin American literature, history, and anyone seeking the human textures behind political upheaval.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1956.

Peter L. Cooper

Signs and Symptoms

$39.95

Signs and Symptoms: Thomas Pynchon and the Contemporary World by Peter L. Cooper situates Pynchon’s achievement within the philosophical, literary, and scientific currents of modern thought, emphasizing his place among American counterrealists. While earlier novelists grounded their work in the traditions of realism and naturalism—offering psychologically rounded characters, coherent narration, and cause-and-effect logic—Pynchon and his contemporaries, including Heller, Vonnegut, Barth, Burroughs, and Nabokov, resist such conventions. Their fiction portrays diminished, often cartoonish characters adrift in grotesque and absurd worlds shaped by entropy, conspiratorial forces, or unfathomable chance. These counterrealists deliberately frustrate narrative expectations, undermining traditional concepts of identity, causality, and meaning to reflect a twentieth-century reality that itself feels fragmented, unstable, and menacing. For Pynchon in particular, paranoia, conspiracy, and epistemological uncertainty become structural motifs, dramatizing the tension between too little structure—cosmic drift toward entropy—and too much structure—bureaucratic control and technological domination.

Cooper argues that although Pynchon mocks humanity’s compulsion to impose order through patterns and interpretive systems, he also acknowledges their necessity. His fiction stages this paradox through unreliable narrators, labyrinthine plots, proliferating symbols, and scientific metaphors that highlight the limits of perception and the inevitability of projection. In works such as *The Crying of Lot 49* and *Gravity’s Rainbow*, characters struggle to interpret evidence, never knowing whether they uncover hidden systems or simply overlay their own delusions upon reality. This epistemological anxiety, shared across counterrealist fiction, links Pynchon to Borges’s infinite regress of invented realities and Barth’s metafictional games, yet Pynchon maintains a more urgent political and historical focus. By tracing the interplay of paranoia, grotesque absurdity, and entropic decline in Pynchon’s oeuvre, Cooper illuminates the novelist’s distinctive position at the crossroads of modern fiction, where satire, science, and philosophy converge to expose the precariousness of knowledge, identity, and control in the contemporary world.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1983.

Peter L. Cooper

Signs and Symptoms

$95.00

Signs and Symptoms: Thomas Pynchon and the Contemporary World by Peter L. Cooper situates Pynchon’s achievement within the philosophical, literary, and scientific currents of modern thought, emphasizing his place among American counterrealists. While earlier novelists grounded their work in the traditions of realism and naturalism—offering psychologically rounded characters, coherent narration, and cause-and-effect logic—Pynchon and his contemporaries, including Heller, Vonnegut, Barth, Burroughs, and Nabokov, resist such conventions. Their fiction portrays diminished, often cartoonish characters adrift in grotesque and absurd worlds shaped by entropy, conspiratorial forces, or unfathomable chance. These counterrealists deliberately frustrate narrative expectations, undermining traditional concepts of identity, causality, and meaning to reflect a twentieth-century reality that itself feels fragmented, unstable, and menacing. For Pynchon in particular, paranoia, conspiracy, and epistemological uncertainty become structural motifs, dramatizing the tension between too little structure—cosmic drift toward entropy—and too much structure—bureaucratic control and technological domination.

Cooper argues that although Pynchon mocks humanity’s compulsion to impose order through patterns and interpretive systems, he also acknowledges their necessity. His fiction stages this paradox through unreliable narrators, labyrinthine plots, proliferating symbols, and scientific metaphors that highlight the limits of perception and the inevitability of projection. In works such as *The Crying of Lot 49* and *Gravity’s Rainbow*, characters struggle to interpret evidence, never knowing whether they uncover hidden systems or simply overlay their own delusions upon reality. This epistemological anxiety, shared across counterrealist fiction, links Pynchon to Borges’s infinite regress of invented realities and Barth’s metafictional games, yet Pynchon maintains a more urgent political and historical focus. By tracing the interplay of paranoia, grotesque absurdity, and entropic decline in Pynchon’s oeuvre, Cooper illuminates the novelist’s distinctive position at the crossroads of modern fiction, where satire, science, and philosophy converge to expose the precariousness of knowledge, identity, and control in the contemporary world.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1983.

Robert Zoellner

The Salt-Sea Mastodon

$95.00

Salt-Sea Mastodon: A Reading of *Moby-Dick, by Robert Zoellner, offers a bold and original critical exploration of Herman Melville’s great novel. Written, as Zoellner explains, “in sheer self-defense” against the terrifying power of *Moby-Dick*, the book seeks to understand the sources of the novel’s unique intensity and the paradoxical combination of fear and delight it produces in readers.

Zoellner proceeds through a systematic analysis of the constitutive metaphors, philosophical underpinnings, and narrative strategies that shape Ishmael’s telling of the tale. Central to his approach is the argument that *every word* of *Moby-Dick*—even dramatic monologues and footnotes—comes from Ishmael, not Melville, a critical assumption that allows Zoellner to treat the novel as a coherent first-person creation rather than a text riddled with breakdowns of point of view. Across chapters, he traces the interplay of illumination and darkness, primal forms and cosmic mirrors, Ahab’s narcissism and Ishmael’s cyclic vision, and the manifold ways the whale itself becomes a vehicle of revelation.

Rejecting critical approaches that treat literature as mere “fun,” Zoellner insists that the exhilaration of *Moby-Dick* arises from the reader’s confrontation with primal truths—fearful but necessary to grasp. His study thus aims not to reproduce the joy of reading Melville’s masterpiece, but to illuminate its sources, revealing how Melville’s metaphors, myths, and philosophical structures create a work that is at once terrifying, exhilarating, and inexhaustibly rich.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1973.

Lawrence Graver

An Obsession with Anne Frank

$95.00

Anne Frank's Diary has been acclaimed throughout the world as an indelible portrait of a gifted girl and as a remarkable document of the Holocaust. For Meyer Levin, the respected writer who helped bring the Diary to an American audience, the Jewish girl's moving story became a thirty-year obsession that altered his life and brought him heartbreaking sorrow.

Lawrence Graver's fascinating account of Meyer Levin's ordeal is a story within a story. What began as a warm collaboration between Levin and Anne's father, Otto Frank, turned into a notorious dispute that lasted several decades and included litigation and public scandal. Behind this story is another: one man's struggle with himself—as a Jew and as a writer—in postwar America. Looming over both stories is the shadow of the Holocaust and its persistent, complex presence in our lives.

Graver's book is based on hundreds of unpublished documents and on interviews with some of the Levin-Frank controversy's major participants. It illuminates important areas of American culture: publishing, law, religion, politics, and the popular media. The "Red Scare," anti-McCarthyism, and the commercial imperatives of Broadway are all players in this book, along with the assimilationist mood among many Jews and the simplistic pieties of American society in the 1950s.

Graver also examines the different and often conflicting ways that people the world over, Jewish and Gentile, wanted Anne Frank and her much-loved book to be represented. That her afterlife has in extraordinary ways taken on the shape and implications of myth makes Graver's story—and Meyer Levin's—even more compelling.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.

Russ Castronovo

Fathering the Nation

$39.95

Russ Castronovo underscores the inherent contradictions between America's founding principles of freedom and the reality of slavery in a book that probes mid-nineteenth-century representations of the founding fathers. He finds that rather than being coherent and consensual, narratives of nationhood are inconsistent, ambivalent, and ironic. He examines competing expressions of national memory in a wide range of mid-nineteenth-century artifacts: slave autobiography, classic American fiction, monumental architecture, myths of the Revolution, proslavery writing, and landscape painting.

Castronovo theorizes a new American cultural studies which takes into consideration what Toni Morrison calls the "Africanist presence" that permeates American literature. He presents a genealogy that recovers those members of the national family whose status challenges the body politic and its history. The forgotten orphans in Melville's Moby-Dick and Israel Potter, the rebellious slaves in the work of Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, the citizens afflicted with amnesia in Lincoln's speeches, and the dispossessed sons in slave narratives all provide dissenting voices that provoke insurrectionary plots and counter-memories. Viewed here as a miscegenation of stories, the narrative of "America" resists being told of an intelligible story of uncontested descent. National identity rests not on rituals of consensus but on repressed legacies of parricide and rebellion.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.

Russ Castronovo

Fathering the Nation

$95.00

Russ Castronovo underscores the inherent contradictions between America's founding principles of freedom and the reality of slavery in a book that probes mid-nineteenth-century representations of the founding fathers. He finds that rather than being coherent and consensual, narratives of nationhood are inconsistent, ambivalent, and ironic. He examines competing expressions of national memory in a wide range of mid-nineteenth-century artifacts: slave autobiography, classic American fiction, monumental architecture, myths of the Revolution, proslavery writing, and landscape painting.

Castronovo theorizes a new American cultural studies which takes into consideration what Toni Morrison calls the "Africanist presence" that permeates American literature. He presents a genealogy that recovers those members of the national family whose status challenges the body politic and its history. The forgotten orphans in Melville's Moby-Dick and Israel Potter, the rebellious slaves in the work of Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, the citizens afflicted with amnesia in Lincoln's speeches, and the dispossessed sons in slave narratives all provide dissenting voices that provoke insurrectionary plots and counter-memories. Viewed here as a miscegenation of stories, the narrative of "America" resists being told of an intelligible story of uncontested descent. National identity rests not on rituals of consensus but on repressed legacies of parricide and rebellion.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.

K. K. Ruthven

A Guide to Ezra Pound's Personae (1926)

$95.00

"Both a commentary on and a critical appreciation of the work of the early Pound. It starts off with a luci introduction to Pound's technique in general, and to his imagist phase (during which the poems commented on in this book were written) in particular. In the critical passages Mr. Ruthven steers a sage middle course between the attitudes of uncritical adoration and wholesale rejection that mar so much of the literature on Pound. . . . informative without being pedantic, and exhaustive without being long-winded. . . .To turn to Mr. Ruthven's Guide is to follow in the footsteps of an intelligent, sensitive and reliable scholar." --English Studies

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1969.

K. K. Ruthven

A Guide to Ezra Pound's Personae (1926)

$39.95

"Both a commentary on and a critical appreciation of the work of the early Pound. It starts off with a luci introduction to Pound's technique in general, and to his imagist phase (during which the poems commented on in this book were written) in particular. In the critical passages Mr. Ruthven steers a sage middle course between the attitudes of uncritical adoration and wholesale rejection that mar so much of the literature on Pound. . . . informative without being pedantic, and exhaustive without being long-winded. . . .To turn to Mr. Ruthven's Guide is to follow in the footsteps of an intelligent, sensitive and reliable scholar." --English Studies

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1969.

Robert Duncan

$34.95

A landmark in the publication of twentieth-century American poetry, this first volume of the long-awaited collected poetry, non-critical prose, and plays of Robert Duncan gathers all of Duncan’s books and magazine publications up to and including Letters: Poems 1953–1956. Deftly edited, it thoroughly documents the first phase of Duncan’s distinguished life in writing, making it possible to trace the poet’s development as he approaches the brilliant work of his middle period.

This volume includes the celebrated works Medieval Scenes and The Venice Poem, all of Duncan’s long unavailable major ventures into drama, his extensive “imitations” of Gertrude Stein, and the remarkable poems written in Majorca as responses to a series of collaged paste-ups by Duncan’s life-long partner, the painter Jess. Books appear in chronological order of publication, with uncollected periodical and other publications arranged chronologically, following each book. The introduction includes a biographical commentary on Duncan’s early life and works, and clears an initial path through the textual complexities of his early writing. Notes offer brief commentaries on each book and on many of the poems.

The volume to follow, The Collected Later Poetry and Plays, will include The Opening of the Field (1960), Roots and Branches (1964), Bending the Bow (1968), Ground Work (1984), and Ground Work II (1987).

Blake Nevius

Robert Herrick

$95.00

Blake Nevius’s Robert Herrick: The Development of a Novelist offers a rigorously contextualized reassessment of an American realist whose reputation straddles the interregnum between Howells and the moderns. Eschewing formal biography, Nevius reconstructs Herrick’s artistic formation through a dense weave of memoir variants, archival traces (municipal and university records, correspondence), and close readings that track the transmutation of lived incident into narrative design. The study’s throughline is methodological: Nevius demonstrates how Herrick’s compulsive recourse to autobiographical matter—family psychodramas, Chicago’s academic and commercial milieus, and a gallery of recognizably roman-à-clef portraits—both powered and constrained his fiction. Chapters align compositional problems with career stages, returning to the acknowledged masterworks—*The Common Lot* (1904), *The Memoirs of an American Citizen* (1905), and *Together* (1908)—to show how Herrick’s documentary impulse, liberal reform commitments, and formal pragmatics coalesced into an unusually capacious social canvas.

For scholars of American realism, Nevius’s contribution is twofold: a clarified textual genealogy and a reframed critical history. He reconstructs the early reception (from Howells’s championship to the 1910 collapse of *A Life for a Life* and the long eclipse) and parses the interwar reassessments (Van Doren, Hicks, Arvin, Kazin), situating Herrick as a diagnostician of upper–middle-class ethos and Progressive-era institutions rather than a mere period “documentarian.” The book is equally attentive to ethics and craft: it probes Herrick’s habitual redeployment of private lives, the aesthetic liabilities of “fact-tyranny,” and the oscillation between sociological breadth and imaginative invention across the late autobiographical novels (*Waste*, *Chimes*, *The End of Desire*) and the Virgin Islands turn. Nevius thus restores Herrick to the cultural and institutional center of early twentieth-century U.S. fiction, mapping the feedback loop between personality, professional life, and novelistic practice with a precision that invites renewed archival, editorial, and theoretical work.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1962.

Arturo Serrano-Plaja

Magic Realism in Cervantes

$39.95

"Magic" Realism in Cervantes: Don Quixote as Seen Through Tom Sawyer and The Idiot explores the enduring impact of Cervantes' Don Quixote through the works of Mark Twain and Fyodor Dostoevsky. The essay draws on the author's conversations with Ernest Hemingway about the significance of Mark Twain, highlighting parallels between Twain's protagonists and Cervantes' iconic knight-errant. The thesis asserts that Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, as well as Dostoevsky's The Idiot, extend Cervantes’ world rather than merely comment on it. These works, through characters like a child and an “idiot,” delve into themes of sincerity, play, and the human condition. The essay suggests that Don Quixote’s actions—whether deeply earnest or whimsically playful—reflect a profound engagement with life, not mockery, as earlier interpretations have suggested.

Building on Ortega y Gasset’s philosophical inquiries about the ambiguity of Don Quixote, the study proposes a fresh perspective by examining the "descendants" of Cervantes' creation in Twain and Dostoevsky. It posits that Cervantes' masterpiece is a "game of life," blending the serious with the playful, and transcending traditional narrative boundaries. By viewing Don Quixote through the lens of Twain's childlike adventurers and Dostoevsky's tragic hero, the essay uncovers a deeper understanding of Cervantes’ intentions, affirming that his work is less a satire and more a celebration of the paradoxes of human existence—an interplay of earnestness and imagination, where life itself becomes both dream and play.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1970.

Arturo Serrano-Plaja

Magic Realism in Cervantes

$95.00

"Magic" Realism in Cervantes: Don Quixote as Seen Through Tom Sawyer and The Idiot explores the enduring impact of Cervantes' Don Quixote through the works of Mark Twain and Fyodor Dostoevsky. The essay draws on the author's conversations with Ernest Hemingway about the significance of Mark Twain, highlighting parallels between Twain's protagonists and Cervantes' iconic knight-errant. The thesis asserts that Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, as well as Dostoevsky's The Idiot, extend Cervantes’ world rather than merely comment on it. These works, through characters like a child and an “idiot,” delve into themes of sincerity, play, and the human condition. The essay suggests that Don Quixote’s actions—whether deeply earnest or whimsically playful—reflect a profound engagement with life, not mockery, as earlier interpretations have suggested.

Building on Ortega y Gasset’s philosophical inquiries about the ambiguity of Don Quixote, the study proposes a fresh perspective by examining the "descendants" of Cervantes' creation in Twain and Dostoevsky. It posits that Cervantes' masterpiece is a "game of life," blending the serious with the playful, and transcending traditional narrative boundaries. By viewing Don Quixote through the lens of Twain's childlike adventurers and Dostoevsky's tragic hero, the essay uncovers a deeper understanding of Cervantes’ intentions, affirming that his work is less a satire and more a celebration of the paradoxes of human existence—an interplay of earnestness and imagination, where life itself becomes both dream and play.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1970.

Blake Nevius

Robert Herrick

$49.95

Blake Nevius’s Robert Herrick: The Development of a Novelist offers a rigorously contextualized reassessment of an American realist whose reputation straddles the interregnum between Howells and the moderns. Eschewing formal biography, Nevius reconstructs Herrick’s artistic formation through a dense weave of memoir variants, archival traces (municipal and university records, correspondence), and close readings that track the transmutation of lived incident into narrative design. The study’s throughline is methodological: Nevius demonstrates how Herrick’s compulsive recourse to autobiographical matter—family psychodramas, Chicago’s academic and commercial milieus, and a gallery of recognizably roman-à-clef portraits—both powered and constrained his fiction. Chapters align compositional problems with career stages, returning to the acknowledged masterworks—*The Common Lot* (1904), *The Memoirs of an American Citizen* (1905), and *Together* (1908)—to show how Herrick’s documentary impulse, liberal reform commitments, and formal pragmatics coalesced into an unusually capacious social canvas.

For scholars of American realism, Nevius’s contribution is twofold: a clarified textual genealogy and a reframed critical history. He reconstructs the early reception (from Howells’s championship to the 1910 collapse of *A Life for a Life* and the long eclipse) and parses the interwar reassessments (Van Doren, Hicks, Arvin, Kazin), situating Herrick as a diagnostician of upper–middle-class ethos and Progressive-era institutions rather than a mere period “documentarian.” The book is equally attentive to ethics and craft: it probes Herrick’s habitual redeployment of private lives, the aesthetic liabilities of “fact-tyranny,” and the oscillation between sociological breadth and imaginative invention across the late autobiographical novels (*Waste*, *Chimes*, *The End of Desire*) and the Virgin Islands turn. Nevius thus restores Herrick to the cultural and institutional center of early twentieth-century U.S. fiction, mapping the feedback loop between personality, professional life, and novelistic practice with a precision that invites renewed archival, editorial, and theoretical work.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1962.

Brook Thomas

American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract

$49.95

In American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract, the author explores the interplay between contract law and literary realism in late nineteenth-century America, a time when both contract law and realism shaped cultural, legal, and social landscapes. The text argues that while contract law in theory emphasized the freedom to negotiate obligations among individuals, it fell short in practice by failing to dismantle deeply entrenched inequalities associated with race, class, and gender. The era’s literature mirrored this dynamic, as authors highlighted the gap between the idealized promises of contractual freedom and the enduring constraints of status. Through this lens, literary realism not only reflected society’s inequities but also critiqued the legal and social systems that perpetuated them.

Realism, which sought to represent everyday life in a grounded, unembellished way, intersected with the contract’s promise by portraying social relations as complex and negotiated, yet constrained by systemic hierarchies. Works like Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and James’s The American evoke moments where relationships of status could theoretically transform into equitable, "contractual" interactions. However, these fictional moments of promise often falter, reflecting contract's inability to establish a truly egalitarian social order. The rise of corporate capitalism further complicated contract’s promise, as corporations fostered a form of economic structure that subordinated individual agency, reinforcing rather than alleviating social inequities.

The text also considers how these issues resonate today, especially as contractual ideals influence contemporary notions of social justice. While the promise of contract continues to appeal to a vision of equal opportunity, the persistent influence of race, class, and gender hierarchies complicates its realization. The author suggests that revisiting works of realism offers valuable insights into these ongoing tensions, challenging readers to reimagine a society where individuals might genuinely be “free and equal,” not just in theory but in practice. In doing so, this book presents realism not as an endorsement of the status quo but as a field of critical inquiry, urging us to address the unresolved questions about equity that persist in American society.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.

Brook Thomas

American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract

$95.00

In American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract, the author explores the interplay between contract law and literary realism in late nineteenth-century America, a time when both contract law and realism shaped cultural, legal, and social landscapes. The text argues that while contract law in theory emphasized the freedom to negotiate obligations among individuals, it fell short in practice by failing to dismantle deeply entrenched inequalities associated with race, class, and gender. The era’s literature mirrored this dynamic, as authors highlighted the gap between the idealized promises of contractual freedom and the enduring constraints of status. Through this lens, literary realism not only reflected society’s inequities but also critiqued the legal and social systems that perpetuated them.

Realism, which sought to represent everyday life in a grounded, unembellished way, intersected with the contract’s promise by portraying social relations as complex and negotiated, yet constrained by systemic hierarchies. Works like Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and James’s The American evoke moments where relationships of status could theoretically transform into equitable, "contractual" interactions. However, these fictional moments of promise often falter, reflecting contract's inability to establish a truly egalitarian social order. The rise of corporate capitalism further complicated contract’s promise, as corporations fostered a form of economic structure that subordinated individual agency, reinforcing rather than alleviating social inequities.

The text also considers how these issues resonate today, especially as contractual ideals influence contemporary notions of social justice. While the promise of contract continues to appeal to a vision of equal opportunity, the persistent influence of race, class, and gender hierarchies complicates its realization. The author suggests that revisiting works of realism offers valuable insights into these ongoing tensions, challenging readers to reimagine a society where individuals might genuinely be “free and equal,” not just in theory but in practice. In doing so, this book presents realism not as an endorsement of the status quo but as a field of critical inquiry, urging us to address the unresolved questions about equity that persist in American society.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.

Robert M. Adams

Bad Mouth

$39.95

Bad Mouth: Fugitive Papers on the Dark Side examines the pervasive and complex ways in which language is used to harm, distort, and alienate. Through a series of essays, the book explores the concept of "counter-language"—words deployed as weapons to insult, deceive, and subvert standards of truth and decency. The collection broadens to examine how these linguistic tendencies mirror and contribute to modern cultural shifts, where the once exceptional use of provocative or offensive language has become increasingly normalized. Beyond language, the book delves into the aesthetics of ugliness and its metaphors—rags, garbage, and excrement—as symbols of a broader cultural fixation on the grotesque.

The author reflects on a significant transformation in art, literature, and everyday discourse over the last fifty years. What was once a minority mode of offense and alienation in art is now dominant, driven by a society increasingly desensitized to shock and degradation. The book resists offering definitive explanations for this shift but presents it as a symptom of cultural upheaval. Whether this trend represents a genuine expansion of expressive possibilities or a descent into sensationalism is left open to interpretation. Ultimately, Bad Mouth challenges readers to confront the evolving vocabulary of modern life and its implications for self-definition, truth, and the human experience.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.

Robert M. Adams

Bad Mouth

$95.00

Bad Mouth: Fugitive Papers on the Dark Side examines the pervasive and complex ways in which language is used to harm, distort, and alienate. Through a series of essays, the book explores the concept of "counter-language"—words deployed as weapons to insult, deceive, and subvert standards of truth and decency. The collection broadens to examine how these linguistic tendencies mirror and contribute to modern cultural shifts, where the once exceptional use of provocative or offensive language has become increasingly normalized. Beyond language, the book delves into the aesthetics of ugliness and its metaphors—rags, garbage, and excrement—as symbols of a broader cultural fixation on the grotesque.

The author reflects on a significant transformation in art, literature, and everyday discourse over the last fifty years. What was once a minority mode of offense and alienation in art is now dominant, driven by a society increasingly desensitized to shock and degradation. The book resists offering definitive explanations for this shift but presents it as a symptom of cultural upheaval. Whether this trend represents a genuine expansion of expressive possibilities or a descent into sensationalism is left open to interpretation. Ultimately, Bad Mouth challenges readers to confront the evolving vocabulary of modern life and its implications for self-definition, truth, and the human experience.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.

T. V. Reed

Fifteen Jugglers, Five Believers

$95.00

T. V. Reed urges an affiliation between literary theory and political action—and between political action and literary theory. What can the "new literary theory" learn from "new social movements," and what can social activists learn from poststructuralism, new historicism, feminist theory, and neomarxism?

In striking interpretations of texts in four different genres—James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, and the ecofeminist Women's Pentagon Actions of the early 1980s—Reed shows how reading literary texts for their political strategies and reading political movements as texts can help us overcome certain rhetorical traps that have undermined American efforts to combat racism, sexism, and economic inequality.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.

T. V. Reed

Fifteen Jugglers, Five Believers

$39.95

T. V. Reed urges an affiliation between literary theory and political action—and between political action and literary theory. What can the "new literary theory" learn from "new social movements," and what can social activists learn from poststructuralism, new historicism, feminist theory, and neomarxism?

In striking interpretations of texts in four different genres—James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, and the ecofeminist Women's Pentagon Actions of the early 1980s—Reed shows how reading literary texts for their political strategies and reading political movements as texts can help us overcome certain rhetorical traps that have undermined American efforts to combat racism, sexism, and economic inequality.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.

Blake Nevius

Edith Wharton

$39.95

Blake Nevius’s close analysis and appraisal of Edith Wharton’s novels and stories reveals the modernity of her fiction and shows why she should have a permanent claim on our attention. Wharton is the only American novelist who has dealt successfully and at length with the remains of traditional New York society, which barely survived the beginning of the twentieth century. She illuminated, as no other novelist of her generation was able to do, a major aspect of U.S. social history through the dramatic conflict between the ideals of the old mercantile and the new industrial societies. Nevius also argues that Wharton, next to Henry James, is our most successful novelist of manners and, along with him, helped preserve the artistic dignity of the novel

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1953.

Robert W. Kirk with Marvin Klotz

Faulkner's People

$39.95

Faulkner's People is an essential reference for the student and general reader of Faulkner who seeks guidance in identifying and interrelating the more than 1,200 characters in Faulkner’s novels, short stories, and sketches. The book will help even experienced readers make their way through the labyrinth of Faulkner’s style and plots and distinguish the interconnections between all of Faulkner’s writings.

The guide is constructed as follows: The novels from Soldiers’ Pay (1926) to The Reivers (1962) are listed by title in the order of their publication. Under each title, all of the named characters who appear or are mentioned in the work are listed alphabetically, together with the number of every page on which the character’s name occurs. A concise account of the actions of each character is given, together with a description of that character’s salient personality features. The name under which a character is listed in the guide is often supplied in brackets when a nickname, maiden name, or other variant is used in the sketches. Major characters in each novel are indicated by boldface type.

Immediately following the section devoted to the novels appear the named characters in all of Faulkner’s short stories and sketches, which are also treated in the order of their publication. Carryover characters who are handled inconsistently by Faulkner are marked with an asterisk and treated further by the authors in the appendix.

The authors have also included genealogical charts of the Sartoris, Burden, and McCaslin-Beauchamp-Edmonds families, as well as a map of Yoknapatawpha County. Finally, an alphabetically arranged master index of characters lists every work in which their names occur. Specific bibliographical information concerning editions is given, together with other editions, American and British, with the same pagination.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1963.

Robert Creeley

The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley

$65.00

Robert Creeley is one of the most celebrated and influential American poets. A stylist of the highest order, Creeley imbued his correspondence with the literary artistry he brought to his poetry. Through his engagements with mentors such as William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, peers such as Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac, and mentees such as Charles Bernstein, Anselm Berrigan, Ed Dorn, Susan Howe, and Tom Raworth, Creeley helped forge a new poetry that re-imagined writing for his and subsequent generations. This first-ever volume of his letters, written between 1945 and 2005, document the life, work, and times of one of our greatest writers, and represent a critical archive of the development of contemporary American poetry, as well as the changing nature of letter-writing and communication in the digital era.

Robert Creeley

The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley

$29.95

Robert Creeley is one of the most celebrated and influential American poets. A stylist of the highest order, Creeley imbued his correspondence with the literary artistry he brought to his poetry. Through his engagements with mentors such as William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound; peers such as Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac; and mentees such as Charles Bernstein, Anselm Berrigan, Ed Dorn, Susan Howe, and Tom Raworth, Creeley helped forge a new poetry that reimagined writing for his and subsequent generations. This first ever volume of his letters, written between 1945 and 2005, document the life, work, and times of one of our greatest writers and represent a critical archive of the development of contemporary American poetry, as well as the changing nature of letter writing and communication in the digital era.

Robert Duncan

$34.95

This volume in the Collected Writings of Robert Duncan series gathers a far-reaching selection of Robert Duncan’s prose writings including most of his longer and more well-known essays along with other prose that has never been widely available. Ranging in original publication dates between 1940 and 1985, the forty-one titles reveal a great deal about Duncan’s life in poetry—including his impressions of poets whose work he admires, both contemporaries and precursors. Evocative and eclectic, this work delineates the intellectual contexts and sources of Duncan’s poetics, and opens a window onto the literary communities in which he participated.

Robert Duncan

$59.95

Profoundly original yet insistent on the derivative quality of his work, transgressive yet affirmative of tradition, Robert Duncan (1919-1988) was a generative force among American poets, and his poetry and poetics establish him as a major figure in mid- and late- 20th-century American letters. This second volume of Robert Duncan’s collected poetry and plays presents authoritative annotated texts of both collected and uncollected work from his middle and late writing years (1958-1988), with commentaries on each of the five books from this period: The Opening of the Field, Roots and Branches, Bending the Bow, and the two volumes of Ground Work.

The biographical and critical introduction discusses Duncan as a late Romantic and postmodern American writer; his formulation of a homosexual poetics; his development of the serial poem; the notation and centrality of sound as organizing principle; his relations with such fellow poets as Robin Blaser, Charles Olson, and Jack Spicer; his indebtedness to Alfred North Whitehead; and his collaborations with the painter Jess Collins, his lifelong partner. Texts include his anti-war poems of the 1960s and 70s, his homages to Dante and other canonical poets, and his translations from the French of Gérard de Nerval, as well as the complete Structure of Rime and Passages series.

Robert Duncan

$34.95

Profoundly original yet insistent on the derivative quality of his work, transgressive yet affirmative of tradition, Robert Duncan (1919-1988) was a generative force among American poets, and his poetry and poetics establish him as a major figure in mid- and late- 20th-century American letters. This second volume of Robert Duncan’s collected poetry and plays presents authoritative annotated texts of both collected and uncollected work from his middle and late writing years (1958-1988), with commentaries on each of the five books from this period: The Opening of the Field, Roots and Branches, Bending the Bow, and the two volumes of Ground Work.

The biographical and critical introduction discusses Duncan as a late Romantic and postmodern American writer; his formulation of a homosexual poetics; his development of the serial poem; the notation and centrality of sound as organizing principle; his relations with such fellow poets as Robin Blaser, Charles Olson, and Jack Spicer; his indebtedness to Alfred North Whitehead; and his collaborations with the painter Jess Collins, his lifelong partner. Texts include his anti-war poems of the 1960s and 70s, his homages to Dante and other canonical poets, and his translations from the French of Gérard de Nerval, as well as the complete Structure of Rime and Passages series.

R. Kent Rasmussen

Dear Mark Twain

$28.95

A voracious pack-rat, Mark Twain hoarded his readers' letters as did few of his contemporaries. Dear Mark Twain collects 200 of these letters written by a diverse cross-section of correspondents from around the world—children, farmers, schoolteachers, businessmen, preachers, railroad clerks, inmates of mental institutions, con artists, and even a former president. It is a unique and groundbreaking book—the first published collection of reader letters to any writer of Mark Twain's time. Its contents afford a rare and exhilarating glimpse into the sensibilities of nineteenth-century people while revealing the impact Samuel L. Clemens had on his readers. Clemens’s own and often startling comments and replies are also included.

R. Kent Rasmussen’s extensive research provides fascinating profiles of the correspondents, whose personal stories are often as interesting as their letters. Ranging from gushing fan appreciations and requests for help and advice to suggestions for writing projects and stinging criticisms, the letters are filled with perceptive insights, pathos, and unintentional but often riotous humor. Many are deeply moving, more than a few are hilarious, some may be shocking, but none are dull.

Robert Duncan

$59.95

A landmark in the publication of twentieth-century American poetry, this first volume of the long-awaited collected poetry, non-critical prose, and plays of Robert Duncan gathers all of Duncan’s books and magazine publications up to and including Letters: Poems 1953–1956. Deftly edited, it thoroughly documents the first phase of Duncan’s distinguished life in writing, making it possible to trace the poet’s development as he approaches the brilliant work of his middle period.

This volume includes the celebrated works Medieval Scenes and The Venice Poem, all of Duncan’s long unavailable major ventures into drama, his extensive “imitations” of Gertrude Stein, and the remarkable poems written in Majorca as responses to a series of collaged paste-ups by Duncan’s life-long partner, the painter Jess. Books appear in chronological order of publication, with uncollected periodical and other publications arranged chronologically, following each book. The introduction includes a biographical commentary on Duncan’s early life and works, and clears an initial path through the textual complexities of his early writing. Notes offer brief commentaries on each book and on many of the poems.

The volume to follow, The Collected Later Poetry and Plays, will include The Opening of the Field (1960), Roots and Branches (1964), Bending the Bow (1968), Ground Work (1984), and Ground Work II (1987).