UpDate - Vol. 15, No. 10, Page 10
November 2, 1995
UD Press lists 22 new releases on variety of subjects

     Since late spring, the University of Delaware Press has published
22 new books-including three by UD faculty-in the fields of
literature, Shakespearean studies, history and art history.

     Carol E. Hoffecker, Richards Professor of History, along with
Richard Waldron, Lorraine E. Williams and Barbara E. Benson, have
edited New Sweden in America. Based on the 1988 conference honoring
the 350th anniversary of the establishment of the New Sweden colony on
the Delaware River, this volume's essays represent the best modern
American and European scholarship on this settlement.

      Brecht Unbound: Essays Presented at the International Bertolt
Brecht Symposium Held at the University of Delaware, February 1992,
was edited by James K. Lyon and the late Hans-Peter Breuer, a
professor of English at the University of Delaware. The work is a
cross-disciplinary reassessment of important aspects of Brecht's work
that has been derived from essays on his poetry, drama writings,
influence on American film techniques, relationship to and borrowings
from Japanese Noh theater and his aesthetic techniques. James K. Lyon
teaches at Brigham Young University.

     Jay L. Halio, UD professor of English, has edited Shakespeare's
'Romeo and Juliet': Texts, Contexts and Interpretation, which includes
seven essays for students and scholars offering a rich and diverse
collection of approaches and ideas to one of Shakespeare's most
popular plays.

     Representing the medieval period is Richard Rex's 'The Sins of
Madame Eglentyne' and Other Essays on Chaucer. Most of the nine essays
concentrate on Madame Eglentyne, the prioress in Canterbury Tales. Rex
is the rare book cataloger at the University of Utah's Marriott
Library.

     The 18 essays of Subjects on the World's Stage: Essays on British
Literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, edited by David G.
Allen and Robert A. White, offer readings on poetic personae, dramatic
production and the influence of social context upon authors or
dramatists. The editors coordinate the Citadel Conference on
Literature, from which these essays were taken.


Books on the Bard

     The strong list of Shakespearean studies has increased with
several new books. H. R. Coursen, professor emeritus from Bowdoin
College and author of Reading Shakespeare on Stage, described how
Shakespeare's script can be interpreted by actors and directors in
different ways to reflect the concerns of a specific zeitgeist.

     French Essays in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: 'What Would
France with Us?', edited by Jean-Marie Maguin and Michele Willems,
prominent French Shakespearean scholars, is the second volume of the
International Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries series,
under the general editorship of Halio. In this book, 19 essays reflect
the development of English Renaissance studies in France over 15
years.

     David N. Beauregard, a Catholic priest and director of
publications for the Pope John Center for the Study of Ethics in
Healthcare, demonstrates in Virtue's Own Feature: Shakespeare and the
Virtue Ethics Tradition that Shakespeare's poetic is essentially
mimetic and that his plays are anchored in the virtue-ethics tradition
of Aristotle and Aquinas.


Literary studies

     Four books in 17-century literature are among the new
publications. The Realms of Apollo: Literature and Healing in 17th-
Century England by Raymond A. Anselment of the University of
Connecticut shows that the period's poems illuminate a new cultural
consciousness of sickness and death.

     Patsy Griffin, of Georgia Southern University, is the author of
The Modest Ambition of Andrew Marvell, a biographical, historical and
critical study that focuses on what Marvell's poetry reflects about
his association with four men in 17-century England.

     In Middleton's 'Vulgar Pasquin': Essays on 'A Game at Chess,' T.
H. Howard-Hill, C. Wallace Martin Professor of English at the
University of South Carolina, situates A Game (1624) in critical,
historical and theatrical contexts.

     The lively and controversial Justice in the Dock: Milton's
Experimental Tragedy takes on the currently dominant readings of
Samson Agonistes that reduce it to a pious charade and shows that
Milton is as subversive a traditionalist in this work as elsewhere.
The author, Harold Skulsky, is Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of
English at Smith College.

     Literature of the 18th century is also represented in the new
offerings. Revealing Difference: The Fiction of Isabelle de Charriere,
by Jenene J. Allison of the University of Texas, gives a new
perspective on that period's fiction.

     The new additions to the body of Johnson's critical opinions
published in Samuel Johnson's Critical Opinions: A Re-examination
serve to illustrate his critical theories and vocabularies, his likes
and dislikes and the books he used. The author, Arthur Sherbo, is
professor emeritus at Michigan State University.

     In Jonathan Swift and the Burden of the Future, Alan D. Chalmers
of the University of South Carolina considers Swift's interest in the
future in the context of pertinent religious, scientific and cultural
debates of his time.

     Despite critical denials, the relationship of children and
parents became an important and continuous theme of British fiction
during the 18th century, as T. G. A. Nelson of the University of New
England in Australia shows in Children, Parents and the Rise of the
Novel.

     Joan M. Byles analyzes the impact of the two world wars on
women's lives from a literary and historical perspective through an
examination of the period's poetic responses in War, Women and Poetry,
1914-1945: British and German Women Writers and Activists. The author
teaches at the University of Cyprus.

     Focusing on the last half of the 20th century, Melvin J. Friedman
and Ben Siegel, editors of Traditions, Voices and Dreams: The American
Novel Since the 1960s, have collected 14 new essays that place
contemporary masters in literary and cultural perspective. Friedman is
professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and
Siegel is professor of English at California State Polytechnic
University.


War, education and sculpture

     Sheldon Cohen, professor of American history at Loyola
University, describes the experience of the American servicemen who
were detained in the British Forton and Mill prisons during the
Revolution in Yankee Sailors in British Gaols: Prisoners of War at
Forton and Mill, 1777-1783. His study helps to explain how the
American character began.

     Anne T. Quartararo's Women Teachers and Popular Education in 19th-
Century France is a social and political study of the network of
women's teacher training schools that was established in France during
the 19th century. The author teaches history at the U.S. Naval
Academy.

     Barbara Groseclose looks at the complicated ways that sculptures
sent to India from London during the heyday of the East India Co.
invoked and ensured a rationale for the British presence in India in
British Sculpture and the Company Raj: Church Monuments and Public
Statuary in Madras, Calcutta and Bombay to 1858. Groseclose is
professor of art history at Ohio State University.

     'The Apotheosis of Democracy, 1908-1916: The Pediment for the
House Wing of the United States Capitol describes the many ill-fated
attempts of sculptors to win the elusive commission for the House
pediment; it also lists a detailed chronology of the actual
commission. Author Thomas P. Somma, who earned his Ph.D. at Delaware,
teaches at Ithaca College.



     All of the above books are available at the University Bookstore.
                                                   -Elizabeth Reynolds