UpDate - Vol. 13, No. 17, Page 9
February 3, 1994
Six new works are released by University Press

     The University of Delaware Press has published six new works in the
fields of literature and sociology. All titles are available at the
University Bookstore.

     Literature and Degree in Renaissance England: Nashe, Bourgeois
Tragedy, Shakespeare is an examination of the interrelations between the
literature and social structures of English society during the Renaissance.
Author Peter Holbrook argues that social stratification is a central topic
of much of the literature at this time, evidenced in recent work in early
modern English social history. He contends that despite recent influential
historical accounts of English Renaissance literature, we are still in need
of more understanding of the ways in which social level was symbolized in
Elizabethan and Jacobean literature. Holbrook is a lecturer in English at
the University of Newcastle, Australia.

     The painting and poetry of the Renaissance shared the same goal of
imitating nature. English poets of the time frequently emphasize the
analagous relationship between the two arts by descriptions of works of art
and by metaphors drawn from the visual arts. Judith Dundas' Pencils
Rhetorique: Renaissance Poets and the Art of Painting is concerned with
these allusions and what they say about the poets' attitudes to the visual
arts and to their own art of representation. This illustrated work begins
with Sir Philip Sidney and ends with John Dryden, with chapters on
Shakespeare, Spenser, Chapman, Jonson, 17th-century minor poets and Milton.
Dundas is professor of English at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign.

     In "Steel for the Mind": Samuel Johnson and Critical Discourse,
Charles H. Hinnant justifies a reexamination of conventional assumptions
about Johnson's writings and demonstrates the importance of his work
through juxtapositions of his literary criticism with today's prevailing
critical movements. Hinnant argues that one cannot separate Johnson's
unique combination of moral and critical analysis from theoretical
assumptions and that a focus on practical judgments invariably carries a
conviction that the critical values behind them are irrelevant. Hinnant is
professor of English at the University of Missouri at Columbia.

     Donald Darnell's James Fenimore Cooper: Novelist of Manners examines
Cooper's treatment of manners in 15 novels, from his first work, Precaution
(1820), to his last, The Ways of the Hour (1850). Following a detailed
study of Precaution, Darnell's book examines Cooper's novels and romances
under these headings: Manners in a Revolution; Manners on the Frontier;
Station, Standards, and Taste; and The Contemporary Scene. The concluding
chapter assesses Cooper's contribution to the novel of manners genre and
his commitment to the upper classes as the repository of value in the
Republic. Darnell is professor of English at the University of North
Carolina at Greensboro.

     "The Yellow Wall-Paper" and Selected Stories of Charlotte Perkins
Gilman, edited by Denise D. Knight, is a collection of 25 of the nearly 200
short stories by Gilman, including the original manuscript version of "The
Yellow Wall-Paper" and many previously unpublished stories. Gilman offers a
surprising range of form and style, and her voice reveals both a staunch
feminist committed to promoting social change and a woman whose caustic wit
was unmatched by her contemporaries. Knight's edition is complete with a
critical introduction, explanatory notes and primary and secondary
bibliographies. Knight is an assistant professor of 19th-century American
literature at the State University of New York College at Cortland and the
editor of Cotton Mather's Verse in English, published by the press in 1989.

     In Organizing, Role Enactment and Disaster: A Structural Theory, Gary
A. Kreps and Susan Lovegren Bosworth present a formal theory, empirically
based on archival accounts, of organizing and role enactment during the
emergency period of disaster. Three core social processes are derived from
Ralph Turner's theorizing about role systems: role allocation, role
complementarity and role of differentiation. Kreps and Bosworth, both at
the College of William and Mary, are professor and instructor of sociology,
respectively. Kreps is the editor of Social Structure and Disaster,
published by the University of Delaware Press in 1989.
                                                  -Heather L. Coyne