American Literature
New Books from Harvard U Press

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HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS CUSTOM CATALOG SERVICE
Spring/Summer 1999 Books
LITERATURE, LITERARY CRITICISM/ LANGUAGE:
American, English, French, Spanish, Other

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ANDRE GIDE
A Life in the Present
ALAN SHERIDAN
In this literary biography of AndrE Gide, an intimate portrait of the reluctantly public man emerges. Following Gide from his first forays among the Symbolists through his sexual and political awakenings to his worldwide fame as a writer, sage, and commentator on his age, Sheridan richly conveys the drama of a remarkable life; the depth, breadth, and vitality of an incomparable oeuvre; and the spirit of a time that both so aptly expressed.
March 1999
35 halftones / 752 pages
ISBN 0-674-03527-5
$35.00 cloth
NOT FOR SALE IN THE COMMONWEALTH AND EUROPE EXCEPT CANADA

THE CLOCKWORK MUSE
A Practical Guide to Writing Theses, Dissertations, and Books
EVIATAR ZERUBAVEL
The Clockwork Muse is designed to help prospective authors develop a workable timetable for completing long and often formidable projects. Eviatar Zerubavel, a prolific and successful author, describes how to set up a writing schedule and regular work habits that will take most of the anxiety and procrastination out of long-term writing, and even make it enjoyable. The Clockwork Muse rethinks the writing process in terms of time and organization.
March 1999
144 pages
ISBN 0-674-13585-7 / $22.00 / L13.50 cloth
ISBN 0-674-13586-5 / $10.95 / L6.95 paper


A CRITIQUE OF POSTCOLONIAL REASON
Toward a History of the Vanishing Present
GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK
Are the "culture wars" over? When did they begin? What is their relationship to gender struggle and the dynamics of class? In her first full treatment of postcolonial studies, a field that she helped define, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the world's foremost literary theorists, poses these questions from within the postcolonial enclave.
May 1999
448 pages
ISBN 0-674-17763-0 / $49.95 / L30.95 cloth
ISBN 0-674-17764-9 / $24.95 / L15.50 paper


DEAD ELVIS
A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession
GREIL MARCUS
As he listens in on the public conversation that recreates Elvis after death, Marcus tracks the path of Presley's resurrection. He grafts together scattered fragments of the eclectic dialogue--snatches of movies and music, books and newspapers, photographs, posters, cartoons--and amazes us with not only what America has been saying as it raises its late king, but also what this strange obsession with a dead Elvis can tell us about America itself.
March 1999
54 halftones, 5 line illus. / 288 pages
ISBN 0-674-19422-5
$17.95 / L10.95 paper


THE FOOTNOTE
A Curious History
ANTHONY GRAFTON
The weapon of pedants, the scourge of undergraduates, the bête noire of the "new" liberated scholar: the lowly footnote, long the refuge of the minor and the marginal, emerges in this book as a singular resource, with a surprising history that says volumes about the evolution of modern scholarship. In Anthony Grafton's engrossing account, footnotes to history give way to footnotes as history, recounting in their subtle way the curious story of the progress of knowledge in written form.
April 1999
255 pages
ISBN 0-674-30760-7
$14.00 paper
NOT FOR SALE IN THE COMMONWEALTH OR EUROPE EXCEPT CANADA


GREEK IAMBIC POETRY
>From the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries BC
EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY DOUGLAS E. GERBER
The poetry of the archaic period that the Greeks called iambic is characterized by scornful criticism of friend and foe and by sexual license. The purpose of these poems is unclear, but they seem to have some connection to cult songs used in religious festivals. In this completely new Loeb Classical Library edition of early Greek iambic poetry, Douglas Gerber provides a faithful and fully annotated translation of the fragments that have come down to us.
Loeb Classical Library® 259
June 1999
427 pages
ISBN 0-674-99581-3
$19.95 / LI2.95 cloth


HOMER
Iliad
TRANSLATED BY A.T. MURRAY
Revised by William F. Wyatt
The works attributed to Homer include the two oldest and greatest European epic poems, the Odyssey and the Iliad. These have been published in the Loeb Classical Library for three quarters of a century, the Greek text facing a faithful and literate prose translation by A.T. Murray. William Wyatt now brings the Loeb's Iliad up to date, with a rendering that retains Murray's admirable style but is written for today's readers.
Volume 1: June 1999,
336 pages
ISBN 0-674-99579-1 (L170N)
$19.95 / L12.95 cloth


IN THE FASCIST BATHROOM
Punk in Pop Music, 1977-1992
GREIL MARCUS
Was punk just another moment in music history? Greil Marcus, author of the renowned Lipstick Traces, delves into the after-life of punk as a much richer phenomenon--a form of artistic and social rebellion that continually erupts into popular culture. In more than seventy short pieces written over fifteen years, he traces the uncompromising strands of punk from Johnny Rotten to Elvis Costello, Sonic Youth, even Bruce Springsteen.
March 1999
448 pages
ISBN 0-674-44577-5
$15.95 / L9.95 paper


AN INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY CHINESE
MICHAEL A. FULLER
This textbook for beginning students contains 35 lessons of increasing difficulty designed to introduce students to the basic patterns of Classical Chinese and to provide practice in reading a variety of texts. The lessons are structured to encourage students to do more work with dictionaries and other references as they progress through the book.
Harvard East Asian Monographs, 176
March 1999
4 maps / 200 pages
cloth: ISBN 0-674-46173-8 / $40.00 / L24.95
paper: ISBN 0-674-46174-6 / $19.95 / L12.50


MIKHAIL KUZMIN
A Life in Art
JOHN E. MALMSTAD AND NIKOLAY BOGOMOLOV
Mikhail Kuzmin (1872-1936), Russia's first openly gay writer, stood at the epicenter of the turbulent cultural and social life of Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad for over three decades. Kuzmin was also a prose writer, playwright, critic, translator, and composer who was associated with every aspect of modernism's history in Russia. This biography, the first in any language to be based on full and uncensored access to the writer's private papers, including his notorious Diary.
April 1999
11 halftones / 512 pages
ISBN 0-674-53087-X
$49.95 / L30.95 cloth


PROCEED WITH CAUTION, WHEN ENGAGED BY MINORITY WRITING IN THE AMERICAS
DORIS SOMMER
Educated readers feel entitled to know what they're reading--often, if they try hard enough, to know it with the conspiratorial intimacy of a potential partner. This book reminds us that cultural differences may in fact make us targets of a text, not its co-conspirators. Some literature, especially culturally particular or "minority" literature, actually uses its differences and distances to redirect our desire for intimacy toward more cautious, respectful engagements. To name these figures of cultural discontinuity--to describe a rhetoric of particularism in the Americas--is the purpose of Proceed with Caution.
August 1999
416 pages
ISBN 0-674-53658-X / $55.00 / L34.50 cloth
ISBN 0-674-53660-6 / $24.95 / L15.50 paper


PROFESSIONAL CORRECTNESS
Literary Studies and Political Change
STANLEY FISH
Stanley Fish raises a provocative challenge to those who try to turn literary studies into an instrument of political change, arguing that when literary critics try to influence society at large by addressing social and political issues, they cease to be literary critics at all. Anyone interested in the debate over the place of cultural studies in the field of literary criticism, or the more general question of whether academics can become the "public intellectuals" many aspire to be, should read Fish's powerful and unconventional argument.
April 1999
160 pages
ISBN 0-674-71220-X
$14.95 / Ll9.50 paper


RECONTEXTUALIZING TEXT
Narrative Perfomance in Modern Japanese Fiction
ATSUKO SAKAKI
Offering the first systematic examination of five modern Japanese fictional narratives, all of them available in English translations, Atsuko Sakaki explores Natsume Soseki's Kokoro and The Three-Cornered World; Ibuse Masuji's Black Rain; Mori Ogai's Wild Geese; and Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's Quicksand.
Harvard East Asian Monographs, 180
May 1999
275 pages
ISBN 0-674-75094-2
$39.50 / L24.50 cloth


SHREDDING THE TAPESTRY OF MEANING
The Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono Katue (1902-1978)
JOHN SOLT
Kitasono Katue was a leading avant-garde literary figure, first in Japan and then throughout the world, from the 1920s to the 1970s. In his long career, Kitasono was instrumental in creating Japanese-language work influenced by futurism, dadaism, and surrealism before World War II and in contributing a Japanese voice to the international avant-garde movement after the war. This critical biography of Kitasono examines the life, poetry, and poetics of this controversial and flamboyant figure.
Harvard East Asian Monographs, 178
June 1999
39 illus. / 425 pages
ISBN 0-674-80733-2
$49.50 / L30.95 cloth


SRNGARAPRAKASA BY BHOJA, VOLUME 1
EDITED BY V. RAGHAVAN
This edition is based on new manuscripts of this important treatise on classical Sanskrit poetics. It was composed by the famous eleventh-century King Bhoja of Malwa (W. India), a patron of traditional learning. The text has never received a complete critical edition. It is important not only because of the theoretical treatment of the erotic sentiment (srngara) in classical Sanskrit texts. It is also a mine of quotations from extant and also from lost Sanskrit and Prakrit poetical texts.
Harvard Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies
Harvard Oriental Series, 53
August 1999
916 pages
ISBN 0-674-88340-6
$95.00 / L59.50 cloth


STILL THE NEW WORLD
American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction
PHILIP FISHER
A provocative new way of accounting for the spirit of American literary tradition, Still the New World makes a persuasive argument against the reduction of literature to identity questions of race, gender, and ethnicity. Ranging from roughly 1850 to 1940 the book reconsiders key works in the American canon--from Emerson, Whitman, and Melville, to Twain, Dos Passos, and Nathanael West.
May 1999
5 halftones, 1 line illus. / 288 pages
ISBN 0-674-83859-9
$29.95 / L18.50 cloth


THOREAU'S COUNTRY
Journey through a Transformed Landscape
DAVID R. FOSTER
In 1977 David Foster took to the woods of New England to build a cabin with his own hands. Along with a few tools, he brought the journals of Henry David Thoreau. Foster was struck by how different the forested landscape around him was from the one Thoreau described more than a century earlier. Part ecological and historical puzzle, this book brings a vanished countryside to life and offers a rich record of human imprint upon the land. Foster adds the perspective of a modern forest ecologist and landscape historian, using the journals to trace themes of historical and social change.
April 1999
19 line illus. / 88 pages
ISBN 0-674-88645-3
$27.95 / L17.50 cloth


WALTER BENJAMIN
Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927-1934
MICHAEL W. JENNINGS, GENERAL EDITOR
In the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, Walter Benjamin emerged as the most original practicing literary critic and public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of Selected Writings, covering the years 1927 to 1934, displays the full spectrum of Benjamin's achievements at this pivotal stage in his career.
Belknap Press
May 1999
14 halftones, 2 line illus. / 704 pages
ISBN 0-674-94586-7
$37.50 / L23.50 cloth


THE WORLD THROUGH A MONOCLE
The New Yorker at Midcentury
MARY F. COREY
Today The New Yorker is one of a number of general-interest magazines published for a sophisticated audience, but in the post-World War II era the magazine occupied a truly significant niche of cultural authority. Balancing the consumption of goods with a social conscience which prized goodness, the magazine managed to provide readers with what seemed like a coherent and comprehensive value system in an incoherent world. Mary Corey mines the magazine's editorial voice, journalism, fiction, advertisements, cartoons, and poetry to unearth the preoccupations and values of its readers, editors, and contributors.
April 1999
256 pages
ISBN 0-674-96193-5
$25.95 / L15.95 cloth


WRITING WAS EVERYTHING
ALFRED KAZIN
New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 1995
A deft blend of autobiography, history, and criticism, Writing Was Everything emerges as a reaffirmation of literature in an age of deconstruction and critical dogma. It stands as clear testimony to Kazin's belief that "literature is not theory but, at best, the value we can give to our experience, which in our century has been and remains beyond the imagination of mankind."
William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization
April 1999
160 pages
ISBN 0-674-96238-9
$12.00/ L7.50 paper

© LEA Book Distributors 1999