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This book tells for the first time the story of the central relationship of novelist Willa Cather’s life, her nearly forty-year partnership with Edith Lewis. Cather has been described as a distinguished artist who turned her back on the crass commercialism of the early twentieth century and as a deeply private woman who strove to hide her sexuality, and Lewis has often been identified as her secretary. However, Lewis was a successful professional woman who edited popular magazines and wrote advertising copy at a major advertising agency and who, behind the scenes, edited Cather’s fiction. Recognizing Lewis’s role in Cather’s creative process changes how we understand Cather as an artist, while recovering their domestic partnership (which they did not seek to hide) provides a fresh perspective on lesbian life in the early twentieth century. Homestead reconstructs Cather and Lewis’s life together in Greenwich Village and on Park Avenue, their travels to the American Southwest that formed the basis of Cather’s novels The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop, their summers as part of an all-woman resort community on Grand Manan Island, and Lewis’s magazine and advertising work as a context for her editorial collaboration with Cather. Homestead tells a human story of two women who chose to live in partnership and also explains how the Cold War panic over homosexuality caused biographers and critics to make Lewis and her central role in Cather’s life vanish even as she lived on alone for twenty-five years after her partner’s death.

Mothering India concentrates on early Indian women’s fiction, not only evaluating their contribution to the rise of Indian Writing in English (IWE), but also exploring how they reassessed and challenged stereotypes about Indian womanhood, thereby partaking in the larger debate about social reform legislations relating to women’s rights in British India. Early women’s writings are of immense archival significance by virtue of the time period they were conceived in. In wielding their pens, these trend-setting women writers (such as Krupa Satthianadhan, Shevantibai Nikambe, Cornelia Sorabji, Nalini Turkhud, among others) stepped into the literary landscape as ‘speaking subjects,’ refusing to remain confined into the passivity of ‘spoken-of objects.’ In focusing on the literary contribution of pioneering Indian women writers, this book also endeavours to explore their contribution to the formation of the image of their nation and womanhood. Some of the complex questions this book tackles are: Particularly when India was forming a vague idea of her nationhood and was getting increasingly portrayed in terms of femaleness (via the figure of an enchained ‘Mother India’), what role did women and their literary endeavours play in shaping both their nation and their femininity/feminism? How and how far did these pioneering authors use fiction as a tool of protest against and as resistance to the Raj and/or native patriarchy, and also to express their gender-based solidarity? How do they view and review the stereotypes about their fellow women, and thereby ‘mother’ India by redefining her image? Without studying women’s perspective in the movement for women’s rights (as expressed in their literature) and their role in ‘mothering India’, our knowledge and understanding of those issues are far from holistic. A detailed study of these largely understudied, sadly forgotten and/or deliberately overlooked ‘mothers’ of IWE is long overdue and this book aims to redress that critical oversight.

Archie Leach was a poorly educated, working-class boy from a troubled family living in the backstreets of Bristol. Cary Grant was Hollywood’s most debonair film star—the embodiment of worldly sophistication. Cary Grant: The Making of a Hollywood Legend tells the incredible story of how the sad, neglected boy became the suave, glamorous star. The first biography to be based on Grant’s own personal papers, the book takes the reader on a fascinating journey from his difficult childhood through years of struggle in music hall and vaudeville, a hit-and-miss career in Broadway musicals, and three decades of film stardom during Hollywood’s golden age. For the first time, the bitter realities of Grant’s impoverished childhood are revealed, including his mother’s mental illness and his expulsion from school at the age of fourteen. New light is shed on his trailblazing path as a film star who defied the studio system and took control of his own career. His genius as an actor and a filmmaker is highlighted through identifying the crucial contributions he made to classic films such as Bringing Up Baby (1938), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Notorious (1946), An Affair to Remember (1957), North by Northwest (1959), Charade (1963) and Father Goose (1964). His own search for happiness and fulfilment, which led him to having his first child at the age of sixty-two and embarking on his fifth marriage at the age of seventy-seven—is explored with new candor and insight. Cary Grant: The Making of a Hollywood Legend is the definitive account of the professional and personal life of an unforgettable star.

Style has often been understood both too broadly and too narrowly. In consequence, it has not defined a psychologically coherent area of study. In the opening chapter, Hogan first defines style so as to make possible a systematic theoretical account through cognitive and affective science. This definition stresses that style varies by both scope and level—thus, the range of text or texts that may share a style (from a single passage to an historical period) and the components of a work that might involve a shared style (including story, narration, and verbalization). Hogan illustrates the main points of this chapter by reference to several works, prominently Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Subsequent chapters in the first part focus on under-researched aspects of literary style. The second chapter explores the level of story construction for the scope of an authorial canon, treating Shakespeare. The third turns to verbal narration in a single work, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Part two, on film style, begins with another theoretical chapter. It turns, in chapter five, to the perceptual interface in the genre of “painterly” films, examining works by Rodriguez, Mehta, Rohmer, and Husain. The sixth chapter treats the level of plot in the postwar films of Ozu. The remaining film chapter turns to visual narration in a single work, Lu’s Nanjing! Nanjing! The third part addresses theoretical and interpretive issues bearing on style in graphic fiction, with a focus on Spiegelman’s Maus. An Afterword touches briefly on implications of stylistic analysis for political critique.

This book considers modern American fiction in its own Italianate coloration: the interplay of sex (the red of passion), violence (the black of violence), and sanctity (the gold of redemption). Its purpose is to involve readers in the mythopoetics of American narrative, long-lived and well overdue, in which Marian Catholicism is seen as integral to apprehending the nexus among eros, grace, and sacrifice in U.S. self-making—especially for Protestants! It starts with Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the primary instigator, as well as with Frederic’s ingenious retelling, The Damnation of Theron Ware, a second persisting prism. Sustained revisionist accounts of five major novels and several stories follow, including Chopin’s The Awakening, James’ The Wings of the Dove, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Cather’s The Professor’s House, and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Each novel is recalled as a melodrama of beset sexuality and revealed as a martyr tale of forbidden love—successive, self-aware courtings of devotional Catholicism that the critical and teaching establishment has found too mysterious and dangerous to recognize, never mind sanction. In counterpoint, the book illuminates each tale in its own terms, which are often surprising yet almost always common-sensical; it identifies the special senses—beauty, courage, and wisdom—that emerge, often in the face of social terror and moral darkness, under Marian-Catholic pedagogy; and it yields an overview of the mainline of the modern American novel in which sexual transgression (including betrayal) and graced redemption (the sanctification of passion, mediated confession, martyring sacrifice) go hand in hand, syncretically.

Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema, an ambitious study of two of South Asia’s most popular cultural forms—cinema and dance—historicizes and theorizes the material and cultural production of film dance, a staple attraction of popular Hindi cinema. It explores how the dynamic figurations of the body wrought by cinematic dance forms from the 1930s to the 1990s produce unique constructions of gender, stardom, and spectacle. By charting discursive shifts through figurations of dancer-actresses, their publicly performed movements, private training, and the cinematic and extra-diegetic narratives woven around their dancing bodies, the book considers the “women’s question” via new mobilities corpo-realized by dancing women. Some of the central figures animating this corporeal history are Azurie, Sadhona Bose, Vyjayanthimala, Helen, Waheeda Rehman, Madhuri Dixit, and Saroj Khan, whose performance histories fold and intersect with those of other dancing women, including devadasis and tawaifs, Eurasian actresses, oriental dancers, vamps, choreographers, and backup dancers. Through a material history of the labor of producing on-screen dance, theoretical frameworks that emphasize collaboration, such as the “choreomusicking body” and “dance musicalization,” aesthetic approaches to embodiment drawing on treatises like the Natya Sastra and the Abhinaya Darpana, and formal analyses of cine-choreographic “techno-spectacles,” Dancing Women offers a variegated, textured history of cinema, dance, and music. Tracing the gestural genealogies of film dance produces a very different narrative of Bombay cinema, and indeed of South Asian cultural modernities, by way of a corporeal history co-choreographed by a network of remarkable dancing women.

The rise of suburbs and disinvestment from cities have been defining features of life in many countries over the course of the twentieth century, especially English-speaking ones. The separation of different aspects of life, such as living and working, and the diffusion of the population in far-flung garden homes have necessitated an enormous consumption of natural lands and the constant use of mechanized transportation. Why did we abandon our dense, complex urban places and seek to find “the best of the city and the country” in the flowery suburbs? A large missing piece in this story is found in Victorian utopian literature. The replacement of cities with high-tech suburbs was repeatedly imagined and breathlessly described in the socialist dreams and science-fiction fantasies of dozens of British and American authors in the nineteenth century. Some of these visionaries—such as Robert Owen, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Ebenezer Howard, and H. G. Wells—are enduringly famous, while others were street vendors or amateur chemists who have been all but forgotten. Together, they fashioned strange and beautiful imaginary worlds built of synthetic gemstones, lacy metal colonnades, and unbreakable glass, staffed by robotic servants and teeming with flying carriages. As different as their futuristic visions could be in their politics or narrative qualities, most were unified by a single, desperate plea: for humanity to have a future worth living, we must abandon our smoky, poor, chaotic Babylonian cities for a life in shimmering gardens.

Poetry in Dialogue in the Duecento and Dante provides a new perspective on the highly networked literary landscape of thirteenth and fourteenth-century Italy. It demonstrates the fundamental role of dialogue between and within texts in the works of four poets who represent some of the major developments in early Italian literature: Guittone d’Arezzo, Guido Guinizzelli, Guido Cavalcanti, and Dante. Rather than reading the cultural landscape through the lens of Dante’s works, significant though they may be, the first part of this study reconstructs the rich network of literary, especially poetic dialogue that was at the heart of medieval writing in Italy before and contemporary with Dante. The second part of the book uses this reconstruction to demonstrated Dante’s engagement with and indebtedness to the dynamics of exchange that characterized the practice of medieval Italian poets. The overall argument of the book, for the centrality of dialogic processes to the emerging Italian literary tradition, is underpinned by a conceptualization of dialogue in relation to medieval and modern literary theory and philosophy of language. By triangulating between Brunetto Latini’s Rettorica, Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘dialogism’, and as sense of ‘performative’ speech adapted from J. L. Austin, Poetry in Dialogue shows the openness of its corpus to new dialogues and interpretations, highlighting the instabilities of even the most apparently fixed, monumental texts (such as Dante’s Commedia).

Long before the U.S. Supreme Court announced that corporate persons freely “speak” with money in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), the Court elaborated the legal fiction of American corporate personhood in Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886). Yet endowing a non-human entity with certain rights exposed a fundamental philosophical question about the possibility of collective intention. That question extended beyond the law and became essential to modern American literature. This book offers the first multidisciplinary intellectual history of this story of corporate personhood. The possibility that large collective organizations might mean to act like us, like persons, animated a diverse set of American writers, artists, and theorists of the corporation in the first half of the twentieth century, stimulating a revolution of thought on intention. The ambiguous status of corporate intention provoked conflicting theories of meaning—on the relevance (or not) of authorial intention and the interpretation of collective signs or social forms—still debated today. As law struggled with opposing arguments (corporate intention, pro versus con), modernist creative writers and artists grappled with interrelated questions, albeit under different guises and formal procedures. Combining legal analysis of law reviews, treatises, and case law with literary interpretation of short stories, novels, and poems, the chapters analyze legal philosophers including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Frederic Maitland, Harold Laski, Maurice Wormser, and creative writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Muriel Rukeyser, Gertrude Stein, Charles Reznikoff, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and George Schuyler.

Poetry in the Making investigates the compositional practices of Victorian poets, as made evident in the autograph manuscripts of their poems. Written in an accessible and stimulating style, the book offers careful readings of individual drafts, paying attention to the revisions, cancellations, interlineations, trials of rhyme and form, and sometimes the large structural changes that these documents reveal. The book shows how manuscript revisions offer insights into the creative priorities and decisions of major Victorian poets (Wordsworth, Tennyson, the Brownings, Clough, Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, Swinburne, and Yeats); and investigates ideas of composition in the period, particularly the uneasy balance between inspiration and labour. Collectively, the chapters develop a survey of how Victorian poets experienced and understood their own creativity, setting abstract claims about inspiration and craftsmanship against their own practical experiences. The book testifies to the value for criticism of poetic drafts, establishing the significance of revision and of manuscript studies for the field of Victorian poetry and for literary scholarship more generally.