NEW ENGLAND BEYOND CRITICISM “Elisa New’s book is a remarkable achievement. It is very rare that a critic manages to ask what seem exactly the right questions, then to answer them in a lively, brilliant, evocative, and supremely intelligent prose.” Charles F. Altieri, University of California “Elisa New is a refreshing voice among critics and historians of literature. She has a keen sense of the nature of New England and its deep spiritual resources, reaching back to the Puritans, moving through the great nineteenth-century expressions of interior landscapes and visions. This is a book I welcome and celebrate.” Jay Parini, Middlebury College Literary criticism of the past thirty years has undercut what the canonizers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw as the fundamental role of early New England in the development of American literary culture. And yet, a determination in literary circles to topple perceived Ivy League elitism and Protestant cultural creationism overlooks the continuing value, beauty, and even practical utility of a canon still cherished by lay readers around the world. This Manifesto raises questions about how academic specialization and the academic study of New England have affected enthusiasm for reading. Using a range of interpretive practices, including those most often deployed by contemporary academic critics, Elisa New cuts across firmly established subfields, mixing literary exegesis with autobiographical reflection, close reading with cultural history, archival and antiquarian inquiry with experiments in style, and lays bare editorial orthodoxies, raising to question the whole hierarchy of values now governing the study of American and other literatures. Taking New England as a test case for a wider, more accessible set of critical practices, New England Beyond Criticism demands that the domain of literary study be opened further to the tastes of the general reader.

Two famous rock stars, Jenna Bradford and Scott Tenny, seek to establish a loving relationship in the glare of the spotlight.

In Beyond Deliverance, Corinne Taylor continues the emotionally riveting and historically intriguing true story begun in her 2012 book, Deliverance from Evil. So beautiful was the sight of Florence in her wedding gown as she walked down the aisle on the arm of her father in the Congregational Church that the thousand guests waiting in hushed conversations gasped in awe. Once an admired debutante in high society of Washington D.C., Florence is humiliated by another collective gasp at scandal just six months after her fashionable wedding was highlighted on the society pages of Washingtons newspapers. Florence now attempts to rebuild her lifejust at the time when the world is rocked by war and epidemic. If she recalls with wrenching pain the girl she used to be, it is because she knows the idealized romanticism of the time before 1915 can never be restored. Once she idealized, now she questionsher own motives as well as the motives of her suitors who again queue up outside her apartment at the Cairo Hotel with impressive credentials, appealing physical form, and flirtatious flattery. Will she settle for friendship in marriage or will she hold out for the passion she desires? This story is about how Florence regains hope in her future, and the irony of her choice in men.

In a unique study of Anglo-Jewish writers in the post-war period, Dr. Sicher traces through their works the story of the rise of the Jewish community from slum poverty to suburban affluence. This period is one of crucial social change in Britain. At the same time, Dr. Sicher raises serious questions about the modern writer’s cultural and ethnic identity. In this process, Dr. Sicher advances the thesis that, under the impetus of the Holocaust, the more traditional conflict between Jewish roots and assimilation has been succeeded by a reassessment of identity and morality. Dr. Sicher’s perspective on this particular period of literature is a highly original one and it should provoke creative reconsideration of other contexts and times as well.

Six short stories, psychic in character.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Age of Innocence explores the supernatural and other unknowns in six short stories. The acclaimed Gilded Age author travels around the world and into the unknown with these six tales. After recovering from a bad fever in a Swiss sanitorium, an American pays a social call to a friend’s lonely sister on the coast of Brittany, but his journey takes a terrifying turn in “Miss Mary Pask.” A wealthy resident of a small Massachusetts town hides a sinister secret inside his home and it’s piqued the interest of his neighbors in “The Young Gentlemen.” A Massachusetts farmer’s wife calls in help when her husband is visited by his dead ex-lover in “Bewitched.” Death, doubt, and distrust blossom in the deserts of Morocco at an American Baptist mission in “The Seed of Faith.” An American author working on his next book heads to Paris to speak with his subject’s late wife in “The Temperate Zone.” Recovering from serious illness, an American professor heads to the south of France, searching for quiet and seclusion in “Velvet Ear-Pads.” Inspired by the author’s own global travels, Here and Beyond is a mix of ghost stories, character studies, and social drama. It was originally published in 1926.