Böcker utgivna av University of Iowa Press

In 1992, the year of the hundredth anniversary of Walt Whitman's death, a major gathering of international scholars took place at the University of Iowa. Over 150 participants heard papers by 20 of the world's most eminent critics of Whitman. Three generations of scholars offered new essays that brilliantly tracked the course of past and present Whitman scholarship. So significant was this historic celebration of the great American poet that the opening session was covered by CBS Sunday Morning, National Public Radio's Morning Edition, the New York Times, and other newspapers across the country. Musical and theatrical performances, art exhibitions, slide shows, readings, songs, and even a recently discovered recording of Whitman's voice were presented during the three days of the conference. But the heart of the conference was this series of original essays by some of the most innovative scholars working in the field of American literature. There has never been a more important collection of Whitman criticism. In these essays, readers will find the most suggestive recent approaches to Whitman alongside the most reliable traditional approaches. Walt Whitman: The Centennial Essays captures Whitman's energy and vitality, which have only increased in the century after his death.

Essays describe life in small towns, farming communities, and suburbs in states from Ohio to North Dakota.

Ten stories tell of an elderly South American woman, a teenage suicide, a divorced couple, and two lovers listening to sounds from a neighbor's apartment.

Beginning with a deceptively simple question--What do we mean when we designate behaviors, values, or forms of expression as "black"?--Evie Shockley's Renegade Poetics separates what we think we know about black aesthetics from the more complex and nuanced possibilities the concept has long encompassed. The study reminds us, first, that even among the radicalized young poets and theorists who associated themselves with the Black Arts Movement that began in the mid-1960s, the contours of black aesthetics were deeply contested and, second, that debates about the relationship between aesthetics and politics for African American artists continue into the twenty-first century. Shockley argues that a rigid notion of black aesthetics commonly circulates that is little more than a caricature of the concept. She sees the Black Aesthetic as influencing not only African American poets and their poetic production, but also, through its shaping of criteria and values, the reception of their work. Taking as its starting point the young BAM artists' and activists' insistence upon the interconnectedness of culture and politics, this study delineates how African American poets--in particular, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Harryette Mullen, Anne Spencer, Ed Roberson, and Will Alexander--generate formally innovative responses to their various historical and cultural contexts. Out of her readings, Shockley eloquently builds a case for redefining black aesthetics descriptively, to account for nearly a century of efforts by African American poets and critics to name and tackle issues of racial identity and self-determination. In the process, she resituates innovative poetry that has been dismissed, marginalized, or misread because its experiments were not "recognizably black"--or, in relation to the avant-garde tradition, because they were.

From the intersection of public and private fear, Kerri Webster's award-winning collection speaks of anxiety and awe, vanishings and reappearances. A city both rises and falls; worlds are simultaneously spoken into being and torn down by words.

Gathering personal essays, scholarly articles, and creative writings on the death penalty in American culture, this striking collection brings human voices and literary perspectives to a subject that is often overburdened by statistics and angry polemics. Contributors include death-row prisoners, playwrights, poets, activists, and literary scholars.

Whether wandering the paths of the imagination, driving through sparsely populated countryside, or listening for the voices of animals, Joseph Campana's poems attend to the ways we are indelibly marked by habitat. Shot full of accidental attachments and reluctant transience, Natural Selections produces from vibrant contradiction potent song.

A series of vividly rendered personal narratives, Trespasses: A Memoir recounts the coming of age of three generations in the rural Great Plains. In examining how class, race, and gender play out in the lives of two farm families who simultaneously love and hate the place they can't escape, Lacy Johnson presents rural whiteness as an ethnicity worthy of study.

Offers a loving ode to the prairies of the Midwest, to west central Iowa, and to family connections that stretch from the authors's Swedish ancestors to his parents to his wife and children. Throughout he embraces "the opportunity, as always, to settle, to remember, and be ready".

A trenchant critique of failure and opportunism across the political spectrum, this argues that social mobility, once a revered hallmark of American society, has ebbed, as higher education has become a mechanistic process for efficient sorting that has more to do with class formation than anything else.

Explores the intriguing cooperation of America's writers-including major figures such as Walt Whitman, John Greenleaf Whittier, E.D.E.N. Southworth, and Herman Melville-with reformers, politicians, clergymen, and periodical editors who attempted to end the practice of capital punishment in the US during the 1840s and 1850s.

A vivid archive of memories, Beth Alvarado's Anthropologies layers scenes, portraits, dreams, and narratives in a dynamic cross-cultural mosaic. Bringing her lyrical tenor to bear on stories as diverse as harboring teen runaways, gunfights with federales, and improbable love, Alvarado unveils the ways in which seemingly separate moments coalesce to forge a communal truth.

On the surface, L.S. Klatt's poems are airy and humorous - with their tales of chickens wandering the highways of Ohio and Winnebago trailers rolling up to heaven and whales bumping like watermelons in a bathtub - but just under the surface they turn disconcertingly serious as they celebrate the fluent word.

In We Have All Gone Away, his emotionally moving memoir, Curtis Harnack tells of growing up during the Great Depression on an Iowa farm among six siblings and an extended family of relatives. With a directness and a beauty that recall Thoreau, Harnack balances a child's impressions with the knowledge of an adult looking back.

Julie Hanson's award-winning collection, Unbeknownst, gives us plainspoken poems of unstoppable candour. They are astonished and sobered by the incoming data; they are funny; they are psychologically accurate and beautifully made.

Argues that contemporary fiction serves primarily as a therapeutic tool for lonely, dissatisfied middle-class readers, one that validates their own private dysfunctions while supporting elusive communities of strangers unified by shared feelings. Aubry persuasively makes the case that contemporary literature's persistent appeal depends upon its capacity to perform a therapeutic function.

An in depth biography of John Ruan, who rose from gravel hauler to multi-millionaire. During his career, Ruan built a diverse business empire based on trucking, banking, real estate, and international trade. One of Iowa's most famous citizens he is known not only for his business savvy but for his philanthropic efforts.

Just prior to his death in 2005, August Wilson, arguably the most important American playwright of the last quarter-century, completed an ambitious cycle of ten plays, each set in a different decade of the twentieth century. This title examines from myriad perspectives the way his final works give shape and focus to his complete dramatic opus.

Educates prairie owners and managers about grassland ecology and gives them guidelines for keeping prairies diverse, vigorous, and viable. This title presents the tools necessary to ensure that grasslands are managed in the purposeful ways essential to the continued health and survival of prairie communities.

Nearly 30 million acres of the Northern Forest stretch across New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Within this broad area live roughly a million residents whose lives are intimately associated with the forest ecosystem. This title includes essays that explore the relationships among place, work, and community in this complex landscape.

Examining the relationships among rivers, floodplains, weather, and modern society; stressing matters of science and fact rather than social or policy issues; and by addressing multiple environmental problems and benefits, this title informs and educates those who experienced the 2008 floods and those concerned with the larger causes of flooding.

Revealing the miniature beauties hidden among the patches of prairie, woodland, and wetland that remain in Iowa's sadly overdeveloped landscape, the seventy-five color photographs in this book presents a cross section of the state's smallest inhabitants.