Books
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Start your search for books on a particular topic using the KU Libraries Catalog. If you need to request an item not owned by KU, check to see whether it is available for InterLibrary Borrowing.
- KU Libraries CatalogUse the KU Libraries Catalog to search for books on your topic. Search results will include print and electronic books owned by the KU Libraries, as well as other materials accessible through the libraries in print or online including journals, newspapers, and more. Note: The regular KU Library Catalog search WILL NOT search at the article level in journals. Instead, it will give you the titles of journals we own.
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- Center for Research Libraries catalog This link opens in a new windowThe Center for Research Libraries acquires and preserves newspapers, journals, documents, dissertations, archives, and other traditional and digital resources from a global network of sources. Depending on format, Center materials can be accessed electronically or obtained for extended loan periods and at no cost by users affiliated with member libraries.
The Center's resources include international newspapers, many dating to the 1700s, U.S. ethnic newspapers, international journals rarely held in U.S. libraries, foreign dissertations, major microform and paper collections from Africa, Latin America, Middle East, Europe, Asia and more. All are searchable through the CRL catalog.
Identifying Books by Subject
As you conduct your research using the KU Libraries Catalog and the QuickSearch bar on the library home page, use the Library of Congress (LC) Subject Headings for items that look useful in order to find other titles on similar topics.
The following are some examples of LC Subject headings relevant to English Language and Literature:
New Books
These items are just a few of the many titles we have recently acquired relating to English and American Literature:
Rewriting Composition: Terms of Exchange by
"Bruce Horner's Rewriting Composition: Terms of Exchange shows how dominant inflections of key terms in composition--language, labor, value/evaluation, discipline, and composition itself--reinforce composition's low institutional status and the poor working conditions of many of its instructors and tutors. Placing the circulation of these terms in multiple contemporary contexts, including globalization, world Englishes, the diminishing role of labor and the professions, the "information" economy, and the privatization of higher education, Horner demonstrates ways to challenge debilitating definitions of these terms and to rework them and their relations to one another. Each chapter of Rewriting Composition focuses on one key term, discussing how limitations set by dominant definitions shape and direct what compositionists do and how they think about their work. The first chapter, "Composition," critiques a discourse of composition as lacking and therefore as in need of being either put to an end, renamed, aligned with other fields, or supplemented with work in other disciplines or other forms of composition. Rather than seeing composition as something to be abandoned, replaced, or supplemented, Horner suggests ways of productive engagement with the ordinary work of composition whose ostensible lack dominant discourse assumes. Other chapters apply this reconsideration to other key terms, critiquing dominant conceptions of "language" and English as stable; examining how "labor" in composition is divorced from the productive force of social relations to which language work contributes; rethinking the terms of value by which the labor of composition teachers, administrators, and students is measured; and questioning the application of conventional definitions of professional academic disciplinarity to composition. By exposing limitations in dominant conceptions of the work of composition and by modeling and opening up space for new conceptions of key terms, Rewriting Composition offers teachers of composition and rhetoric, writing scholars, and writing program administrators the critical tools necessary for charting the future of composition studies"-- Provided by publisher.
Call Number: PE1404 .R469 2016ISBN: 080933450XPublication Date: 2016
Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama by
"A talking body part, a character that is simultaneously alive and dead, a shape-changing setting, or time travel: although impossible in the real world, such narrative elements do appear in the storyworlds of novels, short stories, and plays. Impossibilities of narrator, character, time, and space are not only common in today’s world of postmodernist literature but can also be found throughout the history of literature. Examples include the beast fable, the heroic epic, the romance, the eighteenth-century circulation novel, the Gothic novel, the ghost play, the fantasy narrative, and the science-fiction novel, among others.
Unnatural Narrative looks at the startling and persistent presence of the impossible or “the unnatural” throughout British and American literary history. Layering the lenses of cognitive narratology, frame theory, and possible-worlds theory, Unnatural Narrative offers a rigorous and engaging new characterization of the unnatural and what it yields for individual readers as well as literary culture. Jan Alber demonstrates compelling interpretations of the unnatural in literature and shows the ways in which such unnatural phenomena become conventional in readers’ minds, altogether expanding our sense of the imaginable and informing new structures and genres of narrative engagement" (publisher's website).
Call Number: PN3383.N35 A53 2016ISBN: 9780803278684Publication Date: 2016
Adapted Brains and Imaginary Worlds: Cognitive Science and the Literature of the Renaissance by
"The literary discipline is based on principles of structure and language, is concerned with interpreting the emotions in characters comprising humanity in all its variety reacting to the provocations of their imaginary worlds, and encompasses our cognitive and affective reactions to those representations. So much of what we take from reading, though, is not linked to language: linguistic prompts merely set in motion the associations, memories, and images through which we generate meaning and emotionalize experience. Reading, if it is to understand how and why our minds complete fictive worlds, must take an interest in what the emotions are, where they originate, and what they are for. The cognitive sciences offer valuable perspectives on the feeling brain, perspectives which reveal much about the emotions of imaginary persons and the feelings they arouse in readers. This work aims to connect textual interpretation and brain science. In so doing, it furthers the understanding of literary experience and opens up new approaches to literature in general through philosophical insights into the human brain. Each of the book's eleven chapters sets out to bring a relevant cognitive perspective into the spotlight: memory, the emotions, the self, intentionality, laughter, crying, conversion experience, the psychology of suspense, criminal deviancy, binary ethics--the narrative brain in perceptual and imaginative modes--by analyzing these experiences and emotions in relevant works of Renaissance literature. The texts are both minor but characteristic and canonical, from The Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolphus and The Moral Philosophy of Doni, to Spenser's Faerie Queene and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure."-- Provided by publisher.
Call Number: PR428.P76 B44 2016ISBN: 0773546804Publication Date: 2016
Dirt in Victorian Literature and Culture by
"Addressing the Victorian obsession with the sordid materiality of modern life, this book studies dirt in nineteenth-century English literature and the Victorian cultural imagination. Dirt litters Victorian writing – industrial novels, literature about the city, slum fiction, bluebooks, and the reports of sanitary reformers. It seems to be "matter out of place," challenging traditional concepts of art and disregarding the concern with hygiene, deodorization, and purification at the center of the "civilizing process." Drawing upon Material Cultural Studies for an analysis of the complex relationships between dirt and textuality, the study adds a new perspective to scholarship on both the Victorian sanitation movement and Victorian fiction. The chapters focus on Victorian commodity culture as a backdrop to narratives about refuse and rubbish; on the impact of waste and ordure on life stories; on the production and circulation of affective responses to filthin realist novels and slum travelogues; and on the function of dirt for both colonial discourse and its deconstruction in postcolonial writing. They address questions as to how texts about dirt create the effect of materiality, how dirt constructs or deconstructs meaning, and how the project of writing dirt attempts to contain its excessive materiality. Schülting discusses representations of dirt in a variety of texts by Charles Dickens, E. M. Forster, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing, James Greenwood, Henry James, Charles Kingsley, Henry Mayhew, George Moore, Arthur Morrison, and others. In addition, she offers a sustained analysis of the impact of dirt on writing strategies and genre conventions, and pays particular attention to those moments when dirt is recycled and becomes the source of literary creation" (publisher's website).
Call Number: PR468.M39 S38 2016ISBN: 1138932906Publication Date: 2016
Calypso Magnolia: The Crosssurrents of Caribbean and Southern Literature by
"Focusing on the states of the Deep South in relation with Mexico and island nations such as Haiti and Cuba, Lowe reconfigures the geography of Southern literature as encompassing the "circumCaribbean," a fluid and dynamic framework within which to consider literary history, genre, and aesthetics."-- Provided by publisher.
Call Number: PS261 .L75 2016ISBN: 1469628880Publication Date: 2016
Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction by
"André M. Carrington analyzes the highly racialized genre of speculative fiction—including science fiction, fantasy, and utopian works, along with their fan cultures—to illustrate the relationship between genre conventions in media and the meanings ascribed to blackness in the popular imagination. Speculative Blackness reveals new understandings of the significance of blackness in twentieth-century American literature and culture" (publisher's website).
Call Number: PS374.N4 C37 2016ISBN: 0816678952Publication Date: 2016
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More New Books
Writing Displacement: Home and Identity in Contemporary Post-Colonial English Fiction by
"Using the Palestinian exilic displacements as a critical tool and compass to find intersecting points of reference with the Caribbean, Indian, African, Chinese, and Pakistani dispersions, Writing Displacement studies the metamorphosis of the politics of home and identity amongst different migrant nationals subsequent to the end of WWII and into the start of the new millennium. This book troubles the ideas of citizenship and national belonging and celebrates the freedom to be ’out of place’ which opens doors for and promotes rediscovery of materials that have been repressed or ’pushed aside’ in cultural translation. Displacement falls somewhere between nationalism and nomadology, challenging racism and mental ghettoisation; writing displacement opens doors for critical and aesthetic distance and for balancing the central authority between past and present, tradition and modernity. From Sam Selvon to Salman Rushdie and Monica Ali, Edward Said to Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall, Writing Displacement reroutes filiation to affiliation"-- from Publisher
Call Number: PR888.I3 A4 2016ISBN: 1137580917Publication Date: 2016
The Legacy of the Moral Tale: Children's Literature and the English Novel, 1744-1859 by
"Scholars studying Victorians’ childhood reading have typically emphasized fairy tales and eighteenth-century novels rather than works especially written for children, while children’s literature scholars have focused on the “Golden Age,” which began around 1860 and is epitomized by such works as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). However, as The Legacy of the Moral Tale makes clear,
children’s literature began long before the Golden Age,and the moral tale was prominent among the genres the Victorians remembered. In revealing this long-overlooked connection, the book expands our understanding of the history of the novel and highlights the moral instruction to which nineteenth-century readers were accustomed" (from publisher's website).
Call Number: PR990 .F57 2016ISBN: 1621902048Publication Date: 2016
Writing the Goodlife: Mexican American Literature and the Environment by
"The book looks to long-established traditions of environmentalist thought alive in Mexican American literary history over the last 150 years"--Provided by publisher
Call Number: PS153.M4 Y38 2016ISBN: 0816532001Publication Date: 2016
Fashion and Fiction: Self-Transformation in Twentieth-Century American Literature by
"In Fashion and Fiction, Lauren S. Cardon draws a correlation between the American fashion industry and early twentieth-century literature. As American fashion diverged from a class-conscious industry governed by Parisian designers to become more commercial and democratic, she argues, fashion designers and journalists began appropriating the same themes of self-transformation to market new fashion trends. Cardon illustrates how canonical twentieth-century American writers, including Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Nella Larsen, symbolically used clothing to develop their characters and their narrative of upward mobility . . ." (publisher's website).
Call Number: PS374.C565 C37 2016ISBN: 0813938619Publication Date: 2016
