PERSPECTIVES ON WRITING | Series Editor, SUSAN H. MCLEOD | BEYOND ARGUMENT: ESSAYING AS A PRACTICE OF (EX)CHANGE offers an in-depth examination of how current ways of thinking about the writer-page relation in personal essays can be reconceived according to practices in the "care of the self" - an ethic by which writers such as Seneca, Montaigne, and Nietzsche lived. This approach promises to revitalize the form and address many of the concerns expressed by essay scholars and writers regarding the lack of rigorous exploration we see in our students' personal essays - and sometimes, even, in our own. In pursuing this approach, Sarah Allen presents a version of subjectivity that enables productive debate in the essay, among essays, and beyond. | SARAH ALLEN is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, CO, where she serves as a Rhetoric and Composition scholar and teacher. Her work has been published in Rhetoric Review and in Educational Philosophy and Theory; she also has book chapters in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing (Parlor Press) and in Research Writing Revisited: A Sourcebook for Teachers (Heinemann). Her scholarship generally explores the ethics of the personal essay, and this work informs her teaching, as she works to discover the most useful and effective ways of assisting students in engaging with difficult, dense material and in generating complex, rigorous writings of their own.

Product Description: PERSPECTIVES ON WRITING | Series Editor, Susan H. McLeod | In YOGA MINDS, WRITING BODIES, Christy Wenger argues for the inclusion of Eastern-influenced contemplative education within writing studies. She observes that, although we have "embodied" writing education in general by discussing the rhetorics of racialized, gendered, and disabled bodies, we have done substantially less to address the particular bodies that occupy our classrooms...read more

Product Description: Salvage Work examines contemporary literary responses to the law's construction of personhood in the Americas. Tracking the extraordinary afterlives of the legal slave personality from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first, Angela Naimou shows the legal slave to be a fractured but generative figure for contemporary legal personhood across categories of race, citizenship, gender, and labor...read more

Product Description: Jan-Melissa Schramm explores the conflicted attitude of the Victorian novel to sacrifice and the act of substitution on which it depends. The Christian idea of redemption celebrated the suffering of the innocent: to embrace a life of metaphorical self-sacrifice was to follow in the footsteps of Christ's literal Passion...read more

Product Description: Political Initiation in the Novels of Philip Roth exemplifies how literature and, specifically, the work of Philip Roth can help readers understand the ways in which individuals develop their political identity, learn to comprehend political ideas, and define their role in society...read more

Product Description: Drawing upon historicist and cultural studies approaches to literature, this book argues that the Romantic construction of the self emerged out of the growth of commercial print culture and the expansion and fragmentation of the reading public beginning in eighteenth-century Britain...read more

Product Description: Henry James (1843–1916) has been widely acclaimed for the elegance of his prose, the incisiveness of his social comment, and the subtlety of his psychological analyses. Whereas James’s tales and novels have been carefully studied over the past decades, his non-fiction, including literary criticism, travel writing, biographies, and autobiographies, still remains at the margins of critical activities...read more

Product Description: Examining the nature of weakness has inspired some of the most influential aesthetic and philosophical portraits of the human condition. By reading a selection of canonical literary and philosophical texts, Michael O'Sullivan charts a history of responses to the experience and exploration of weakness...read more

Product Description: A century before psychoanalytic discourse codified a scientific language to describe the landscape of the mind, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe explored the paradoxes of an interior self separate from a conscious self. Though long acknowledged by the developers of depth psychology and by its historians, Goethe's literary rendering of interiority has not been the subject of detailed analysis in itself...read more

Product Description: This book offers new perspectives on the concept of habit in the nineteenth-century novel, delineating the complex, changing significance of the term and exploring the ways in which its meanings play out in a range of narratives, from Dickens to James.

Product Description: The problems of knowing and representing the other are acute every time we encounter a text as writers or readers. Ethical Encounters engages with the representation of encounters with alterity in the writings of the Canadian author Rudy Wiebe...read more

Product Description: Arising from a research project conducted over two years, Transformative Learning through Creative Life Writing examines the effects of fictional autobiography on adult learners’ sense of self. Starting from a teaching and learning perspective, Hunt draws together ideas from psychodynamic psychotherapy, literary and learning theory, and work in the cognitive and neurosciences of the self and consciousness, to argue that creative life writing undertaken in a supportive learning environment, alongside opportunities for critical reflection, has the power to transform the way people think and learn...read more

Product Description: The first book-length study to trace the origins of the essay to the conte, Montaigne and Brief Narrative Form puts the reader in touch with how unstable times and exceptional artistic insights transform one genre to create a new artistic form.

Product Description: Samuel Beckett's work is deeply concerned with physical contact - remembered, half-remembered, or imagined. Applying the philosophical writings of Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Merleau-Ponty that feature sensation, this study examines how Beckett's later work dramatizes moments of contact between self and self, self and world, and self and other...read more

Product Description: This title shows how the concept of a female "I" or sense of identity emerged in Greek literature during the twentieth century. In this monograph, Dr. Comatsos analyzes the utilization of female narrators in Greek fiction from 1924-1962 and connects the appearance of women in the public sphere in Greece...read more

Product Description: The self has a history. In the West, the idea of the soul entered Christianity with the Church Fathers, notably Augustine. During the Renaissance the idea of the individual attained preeminence, as in the works of Montaigne. In the seventeenth century, philosophers such as Descartes formulated notions of selfhood that did not require a divine foundation; in the next century, Hume grew skeptical of the self's very existence...read more