Postcolonial Parabola

“Postcolonial Parabola brings an innovative application of phenomenology to bear on literature from disparate postcolonial periods (apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, the partition of India, and the Sri Lankan civil war). It argues that the process of reading postcolonial literature is essentially asymptotic, approaching the disclosure of trauma without arriving, and that the awareness of this asymptotic process is crucial to engaging meaningfully and ethically with postcolonial trauma in literary form.”

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The Lure of Literacy

“The Lure of Literacy promises to transcend the stale and unproductive debate on freshman composition that has gripped English studies for more than a century. It is the first book to chart the origin of the discussion from the early twentieth century to the advent of the New Literacy Studies.”

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Popular Plays by Women in the Restoration & Eighteenth Century, ed. Tanya Caldwell (Broadview Press 2011)

This anthology offers a selection of popular dramatic works by female playwrights from Aphra Behn in the 1670s through Hannah Cowley in the later eighteenth century. These plays were successful as plays of their time, not just as plays by women, together providing evidence that women dramatists often managed better than their male counterparts to please diverse audiences, who were notoriously fickle as well as predisposed to oppose them.

Lost Homelands

Ruin and Reconstruction in the 20th-Century Southwest

As photographer Edward Weston and his companion Charis Wilson drove along the old Butterfield stage route through the Colorado Desert in the spring of 1937, they discovered two signs. The first was a familiar warning posted by the Southern California Automobile Club:

A History of Western American Literature

The American West is a complex region that has inspired generations of writers and artists. Often portrayed as a quintessential landscape that symbolizes promise and progress for a developing nation, the American West is also a diverse space that has experienced conflicting and competing hopes and expectations.

A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West

A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West presents a series of essays that explore the historic and contemporary cultural expressions rooted in America’s western states.

Postwestern Cultures

Literature, Theory, Space

Edited by Susan Kollin

Postwestern Cultures synthesizes the most critical topics of contemporary scholarship of the American West within a single volume. This interdisciplinary anthology features leading scholars in the varied fields of western American literary studies and includes new regional studies, global studies, studies of popular culture, environmental criticism, gender and queer theory, and multiculturalism.

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Persuasion: History, Theory, Practice

George Pullman’s lively and accessible introduction to the study of persuasion is an ideal text for use in courses where the understanding and practice of argumentation, rhetoric, and critical thinking are central.

A Rulebook for Decision Making

“Pullman offers his readers essential insights into how humans reason and make decisions. Both concise and far-reaching, his work teaches us how to challenge intuitive logic and examine the processes for deliberative reasoning.

Writing Online: Rhetoric for the Digital Age

(Forthcoming – March 2016)– “Contrary to the old adage about finding new names for old things, Writing Online: Rhetoric for the Digital Age gives new life and new meaning to old names.

Gaillet, Lynée Lewis, Diana Eidson, and Donald Gammil, Jr. Landmark Essays in Archival Research. Routledge. 2016.

This collection gathers over twenty years of essays addressing archival research methodologies and methods. The selection of essays found within, presented chronologically, bring forward the theories and practices that define this essential form of scholarly inquiry.

Gaillet, Lynée Lewis and Michelle F. Eble. Primary Research and Writing: People, Places, and Spaces. Routledge. 2015.

Developed for emerging academic writers, Primary Research and Writing offers a fresh take on the nature of doing research in the writing classroom. Encouraging students to write about topics for which they have a passion or personal connection, this text emphasizes the importance of primary research in developing writing skills and abilities.

Gaillet, Lynée Lewis and Letizia Guglielmo, Eds. Publishing in Community: Case Studies for Contingent Faculty Collaborations. Palgrave Pivot. 2015.

Contingent Faculty Publishing in Community: Case Studies for Successful Collaborations highlights the innovative work of contingent faculty across disciplines and provides scholarly models for drawing other contingent faculty into these discussions. Scholarship tells us that the best teachers engage in professional development, and reflect upon and share best teaching practices. Since contingent teachers often aren’t viewed as faculty members, they are overlooked in faculty decisions affecting both their professional careers and quality of life.

Gaillet, Lynée Lewis and Letizia Guglielmo, Scholarly Publication in a Changing Academic Landscape: Models for Success. Palgrave Pivot. 2014.

Scholarly Publication in a Changing Academic Landscape focuses on ways contingent faculty members can join scholarly conversations by making public the work they are already engaged in and how they might publish their way into increased fulfillment and increased job security. Recognizing that contingent faculty often find few opportunities to enroll in publication courses, take advantage of professional development and mentoring sessions, or find allies and peers within their departments, this volume outline the realities of contingent employment and offers concrete advice for maintaining a research and publishing agenda, even without department support.

Gaillet, Lynée Lewis with Winifred Bryan Horner. Present State of Scholarship in the History of Rhetoric. 2nd ed. University of Missouri Press, 2010.

Adopting research methodologies of revision and recovery, this latest edition of The Present State includes all new material while still following the format of the original editions and is constructed around bibliographical surveys of both primary and secondary works addressing the Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, and eighteenth through twentieth-first century periods within the history of rhetoric. This edition of The Present State of Scholarship in the History of Rhetoric doesn’t simply update but rather recasts study in the history of rhetoric.

Gaillet, Lynée Lewis and Michelle F. Eble, Eds. Stories of Mentoring: Research and Praxis. Parlor Press. 2008.

This collection defines the current status of mentoring in the field of composition and rhetoric by providing both snapshots and candid descriptions of what that mentoring means to those working in the discipline. Seventy-eight Contributors offer a wide array of evidence and illustrations in an effort to define what mentoring entails, its important benefits and consequences, and its role in creating the future character of the field.

Gaillet, Lynée Lewis, Ed. Scottish Rhetoric and Its Influences. Hermagoras Press/Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998.

This collection challenges the reader to reexamine the broad influence of 18th- and 19th-century Scottish rhetoric, often credited for shaping present-day studies in psychology, philosophy, literary criticism, oral communication, English literature, and composition. The contributors examine its influence and call for a new appraisal of its importance in light of recent scholarship and archival research.

The Language of Modernism. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1989.

A study of linguistic and stylistic commonalities in modernist literature, focusing mainly on Joyce, Woolf, and Eliot.

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T.S. Eliot’s Drama: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992.

A reference book about Eliot’s plays recounting production and publishing histories, reviews, and scholarly responses.

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Where the Words Are Valid: T.S. Eliot’s Communities of Drama. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994.

A critical study of Eliot’s plays that demonstrates how these lesser-known works are an important facet of his overall canon.

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Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity. New York: NYU Press, 1998.

A critique of zoos, as seen through the perspective of dozens of literary and cultural accounts (“zoo stories”).

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Poetic Animals and Animal Souls. New York: Palgrave, 2003.

A study of several writers (including Marianne Moore, Stevie Smith, and José Emilio Pacheco) whose poetry manifests an especially keen degree of empathy with other animals.

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Editor, The Waste Land and Other Poems. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2005.

An edition of Eliot’s first three collections of poetry.

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A Cultural History of Animals in the Modern Age. Oxford: Berg, 2007.

A collection of essays about such topics as hunting, domestication, scientific experimentation, philosophy, and zoos.

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An Introduction to Animals and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

An analysis of how human culture frames other animals in photography, film, internet memes, and other visual media and arts.

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The Structure of Shakespearean Scenes. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1981.

The first systematic and comprehensive study of Shakespeare’s structure in terms of individual scenes is The Structure of Shakespearean Scenes . . . by James E. Hirsh, a brilliant assistant professor at The University of Hawaii. . . .

Ed. New Perspectives on Ben Jonson.

Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1997. London: Associated University Presses, 1997. Google ebook, 2010.

James Hirsh deserves credit for assembling this volume so carefully . . ., but his essay on Volpone also deserved mention….the analysis of the way the cynicism carries through several key words—”fool,” “conscience,” “virtue,” and (especially) “father”—is wonderfully illuminating.

Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies.

            Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2003. London: Associated University Presses, 2003. Google ebook, 2010.

like the Poetics, it is a book that fundamentally alters one’s view of the intellectual landscape it surveys. It is, in short, an essential book on a major topic—a book that any true student of Shakespeare (or indeed of Western drama) will need and want to have close by….

Brothers in Clay: The Story of Georgia Folk Pottery. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983.

Abundantly illustrated, Brothers in Clay tells the story of Georgia’s rich folk pottery tradition―the historical forces that shaped it and the families and individual artisans who continue to keep it alive. This pioneering book marked the first intensive study of a southern state’s pottery heritage and the first major examination of a native Georgia art form.

Storytellers: Folktales and Legends from the South. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989.

Shaping Traditions: Folk Arts in a Changing South. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000.

A complete catalog of the Atlanta History Center’s permanent folk art exhibition, this richly illustrated volume defines and documents the folk arts of the lower southeastern United States.

Roots of a Region: Southern Folk Culture. University Press of Mississippi (Southern Folklore Series), 2007.

Roots of a Region reveals the importance of folk traditions in shaping and expressing the American South. This overview covers the entire region and all forms of ex-pression-oral, musical, customary, and material.

From Mud to Jug: The Folk Potters and Pottery of Northeast Georgia. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010 (Georgia Author of the Year Award, Specialty Category, 2011).

John Michael Vlach called Brothers in Clay “not only the best study of American stoneware pottery now available but also a fine model for the presentation and analysis of hand-based technologies.”

2012. Hardcover and paperback printed simultaneously.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the author’s life, times, and writings. It describes essential details from Milton’s biography, explains some of the cultural and historical contexts in which he wrote, offers fresh analyses of his major pamphlets and poems, and describes in great depth traditional and recent responses to his reputation and writings.

Milton and Heresy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Co-editor John

Rumrich. Reprinted in a paperback edition, 2009.

This collection of essays addresses aspects of Milton’s works inconsistent with conventional beliefs, both in terms of seventeenth-century theology and the common assumptions of Milton critics.

1999. Reprinted in a paperback edition, 2009.

This original study explores Milton’s relationship to the seventeenth-century book trade. Critics have often assumed that Milton presided over all stages of his texts’ creation, and little has been said about his dependence on other people for producing his works.

Milton in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Editor.

Reprinted in a revised paperback edition, 2015.

This collection of 40 original essays examines the author’s life and works within his cultural and historical circumstances. The book received the Irene Samuel Memorial Award from the Milton Society of America for a distinguished edition, bibliography, or edited collection.

Milton’s Visual Imagination: Imagery in “Paradise Lost.” Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, forthcoming 2015.

Critics have traditionally found fault with the descriptions and images in John Milton’s poetry and thought of him as an author who wrote for the ear more than the eye. This book proposes that, on the contrary, he enriches the story of humankind’s Fall in Paradise Lost with acute and sometimes astonishing visual details.

Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2005. Reprinted in a paperback edition, 2009.

This book examines how the seventeenth-century phenomenon of printing apparently unfinished works ushered in a new emphasis on authors’ responsibility for written texts while it simultaneously reinforced Renaissance practices of active reading. Through the blank spaces in writers’ works, we glimpse the tension between implication and inference, between writers’ intentions and readers’ responses, and between an individual author and a collaborative community.

Student Guide to First-Year Writing. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994. Co-authors

Elizabeth Burow-Flak and Alison Regan.

Covering everything from registering for classes to revising essays, this book complements first-year rhetoric textbooks by providing detailed, practical advice and information on the demands of a composition class.

A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton: “Samson Agonistes.”

Intro. Archie Burnett. Ed. P. J. Klemp. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University

Press, 2009.

This monograph reviews and synthesizes three centuries of scholarly notes, articles, and books about Samson Agonistes, one of Milton’s greatest poetic works. The book comprises both annotations for individual lines and longer essays for key scenes and passages.

Fetishism and Its Discontents in Post-1960 American Fiction.  New York: Palgrave, 2010.  256 pp.

This monograph argues that novels and short stories by Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, Ishmael Reed, John Hawkes, Robert Coover, and Tim O’Brien advance a post-Enlightenment understanding of fetishism as a strategy for expressing social and political discontent, and for negotiating traumatic experiences particular to the second half of the twentieth century.

West, Elizabeth J. African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction: Threaded Visions of Memory, Community, Nature and Being. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011. Paperback edition, 2012.

African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction examines New World African spirituality as a syncretic dynamic of spiritual retentions and transformations that have played prominently in the literary imagination of black women writers.

West, Elizabeth J. co-ed. Literary Expressions of African Spirituality. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books 2013). Paperback edition, 2015.

With essays focusing on African spirituality in creative works by several trans-Atlantic black authors across varying locations in the Ameri-Atlantic diaspora, Literary Expressions of African Spirituality leads the way to more comprehensive trans-geographical studies of African spirituality in black art.

Understanding Edward Albee (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987).

          “. . . the best introduction to the playwright’s major works that is now available to students and the general reader.. . . Roudané moves freely and gracefully in and around his thorough research with a confident familiarity with the mass of secondary criticism on Albee and a rewarding intimacy with the plays.” Modern Drama

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Conversations with Arthur Miller (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1987).

This edited collection contains 39 interviews with Miller.

These interviews “genuinely reward the careful study that reprinting now allows. . . .” Modern Drama

Conversations with Arthur Miller is “a worthwhile collection” edited by “Roudané, a bright scholar of Miller and American drama.” Resources for American Literary Study

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American Dramatists: Contemporary Authors Bibliographic Series, Vol. 3 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1989).

This edited volume contains 17 bibliographic essays on major contemporary American playwrights from some of the leading scholars in the field.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia  Woolf?

“Roudané’s precise and invaluable scholarship continues throughout his volume.”

                                                     Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism

Public Issues, Private Tensions

“The essays are thoughtful, provocative, and lucid.”

American Literature

Approaches to Teaching Miller’s ‘Death of a Salesman’ (New York: Modern Language Association, 1995).

This edited volume contains 16 essays whose pedagogical focus helps spark new approaches to teaching Miller’s classic play.

American Drama, 1960-Present: A Critical History (New York: Twayne, 1996; paperback edition, 1997).

“Roudané surveys the evolution of American drama during the previous three decades, arguing that contemporary playwrights have revitalized the genre through their forays into issues of identity, politics, and stylistic experimentation.” American Literature

The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,        1997). Reprinted in Chinese edition, 2001.

This is a collection of 14 original essays from a team of leading scholars. Contributors cover a sampling of the major plays as well as some minor stage works, short stories and poems.

The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

This is a collection of 18 original essays from an international team of leading drama scholars.   It also features Roudané’s interview with Shepard.

Drama Essentials: An Anthology of Plays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2009).

This book traces the evolution of theater and allows readers to gain a critical appreciation for the art of dramatic writing. It contains plays by Sophocles, William Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, Susan Glaspell, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, David Mamet, Harold Pinter, Gao Xingjian, Paula Vogel, and Suzan-Lori Parks.
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The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary American Playwrights (London: Methuen/Bloomsbury, 2014). Co-edited with Christopher Innes, Martin Middeke, and Peter Paul Schnierer.

This collection surveys 25 representative playwrights of contemporary American drama. The chapters are written by a team of internationally renowned specialists from the United Kingdom, United State, Canada, Italy, and Germany.
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The Collected Essays of Arthur Miller (London: Methuen/Bloomsbury, 2015).

This nearly 600-page comprehensive volume brings together essays (from 1944 to 2000) by one of the most influential literary, cultural, and intellectual voices of our time: Arthur Miller. Containing a new introduction by Roudané, this book has received glowing reviews from all over the world.

Stray: A Novel. San Francisco: MacAdam/Cage, 2007.  A musician is torn between his Mennonite wife and a young actor, his former lover from a previous life.  In a single night that slips out of control, the volatile mix of emotions leads to murder, and all three characters become more involved with each other’s lives than they could have foreseen.

Bear Me Safely Over. New York: Grove/Atlantic Press, 2002.  A cycle of stories about two Georgia families being joined by marriage.  Tackling dark themes — the menace of homophobia, the splintering of families, the discordant voice of religious fundamentalism — the story assembles a portrait of the different and often elusive faces of salvation.

Sky Blue Enough to Drink

Insightful and beautifully crafted, the poems in Sky Blue Enough to Drink show us the extraordinary that can be found in ordinary details of daily life.

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Stewart Parker: A Life

Born in Belfast during World War II, raised in a working-class Protestant family, and educated on scholarship at Queen’s University, writer Stewart Parker’s story is in many ways the story of his generation.

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Acting Between the Lines: The Field Day Theatre Company and Irish Cultural Politics

The Field Day Theatre Company has been a vital presence on the cultural and intellectual scene in Ireland since its inception in 1980.

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 Adventures in Theory: A Compact Anthology

An alternative to the conventional unwieldy theory anthology, Adventures in Theory offers a manageably short collection of critical statements crucial to the understanding of theory. It presents a relatively brief but steadily unsettling tour, spanning the most significant thought-provocations in the history of theoretical wiring from Marx and Nietzsche through Foucault and Derrida to Butler, Zizek, and Edelman. Engagingly lean and enjoyably mean, Adventures in Theory is a minimalist anthology with maximal pedagogical impact.

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 Masculinity, Psychoanalysis, Straight Queer Theory: Essays on Abjection in Literature, Culture, and Film

This book concerns the productions of masculinity; it draws heavily, perhaps lugubriously, on Lacanian psychoanalysis; and, despite the fact that its author participates in and benefits from the dominant social order as a privileged heterosexual male, the book nonetheless attempts to proliferate theoretically queer discourses that are inimical to that order, to its dominance and to its privileges.

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Ten Lessons in Theory: An Introduction to Theoretical Writing

The central premise of this book is that literary theory isn’t simply theory “about” literature, but that theory fundamentally is literature. Ten Lessons in Theory argues and demonstrates that “theoretical writing” is nothing if not a specific genre of “creative writing,” a particular way of engaging in the art of the sentence, the art of making sentences that make trouble—sentences that desire to make radical changes in the very fabric of social reality.

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Male Matters: Masculinity, Anxiety, and the Male Body on the Line

Male Matters reveals the act and production of writing as a bodily, material process that transgresses the boundaries of gender. Wise and quirky, sophisticated and coarse, serious and hilarious, this look at male identity and creativity and dislocation at the end of the twentieth century definitely will not assuage male anxiety!

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Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality

This engaging collection poses the question, Can straight people think queer? Straight with a Twist offers a refreshing look at the relation between queer theory and critical examinations of the construction of heterosexuality. Committed to  antihomophobic cultural analysis, Straight with a Twist aims to extend the reach of queer theory and humanize the world by making it “queerer than ever.” 

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