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Hathi Trust Digital Library Hathi Trust is a collection of millions of volumes of searchable books, journals, and government documents, including many public domain materials available as full-text online. To take advantage of BU's membership in Hathi Trust which allows full volume download of public domain items, go directly to the HathiTrust website. Click the Login button. Select Boston University from the drop-down list. Then enter your BU username and password in the next screen.
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Literature Online (LION) LION includes texts, criticism, and reference material, including thousands of literary articles, essays, biographies and encyclopedia entries on over 350,000 works of poetry, prose, and drama from the 8th to the 21st century.
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Louisa May Alcott
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Louisa May Alcott, her life, letters, and journals byLocation: Online - HathiTrustPublication Date: 1889
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Alcott in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her LIfe, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates by By 1888, twenty years after the publication of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) was one of the most popular and successful authors America had yet produced. In her pre-Little Women days, she concocted blood-and-thunder tales for low wages; post-Little Women, she specialized in domestic novels and short stories for children. Collected here for the first time are the reminiscences of people who knew her, the majority of which have not been published since their original appearance in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Many of the printed recollections in this book appeared after Alcott became famous and showcase her as a literary lion, but others focus on her teen years, when she was living the life of Jo March; these intimate glimpses into the life of the Alcott family lead the reader to one conclusion: the family was happy, fun, and entertaining, very much like the fictional Marches. The recollections about an older and wealthier Alcott show a kind and generous, albeit outspoken, woman little changed by her money and status. From Annie Sawyer Downs's description of life in Concord to Anna Alcott Pratt's recollections of the Alcott sisters' acting days to Julian Hawthorne's neighborly portrait of the Alcotts, the thirty-six recollections in this copiously illustrated volume tell the private and public story of a remarkable life.Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2005 -
Louisa May Alcott: The Contemporary Reviews by This collection of nineteenth-century reviews provides a wealth of information for scholars interested in Alcott (increasing the number of indexed reviews almost tenfold) but also insight into the ways in which reading audiences were constructed in the nineteenth-century United States. The reviews provide a window on to nineteenth-century attitudes toward popular fiction and toward women writers. The author of the novels and of sensational tales, of travel writing and of temperance tracts, Alcott was both highly popular and highly respected. Her works were reviewed not just in magazines for children, but also in the most prestigious literary journals of the day.Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2004 -
Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing by Are American women writers from different eras and different backgrounds connected by common threads in a coherent tradition? How have the relationships between women's rights, women's rites, and women's writing figured in the history of literature by women in the United States?Drawing on a wide range of writers from Margaret Fuller to Alice Walker, Elaine Showalter argues that post-colonial as well as feminist literary theory can help us understand the hybrid, intertextual, and changing forms of American women's writing, and the way that `women's culture' intersects withother cultural forms. Showalter looks closely at three American classics - Little Women, The Awakening, and The House of Mirth - and traces the transformations in such major themes, images, and genres of American women's writing as the American Miranda, the Female Gothic, and the patchwork quilt.Ending with a moving description of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, she shows how the women's tradition is a literary quilt that offers a new map of a changing America.Location: OnlinePublication Date: 1991 -
The Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia by Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) is arguably the most widely read 19th-century author in America. Even through the 1990s, her books continued to appear on bestseller lists and her works were made into films. She has long been a staple of children's literature courses and now also receives significant attention in American studies and women's studies classes. While her tremendous popularity has yielded numerous biographies and a growing number of critical works, very few reference books have been devoted to Alcott studies and none are particularly current or complete. This book collects in a comprehensive and reliable single volume the most important facts about Alcott's life and works. This reference surveys the basic biographical details about Alcott's family and personal life. It supplies essential information on her historical and cultural contexts, including her place in the 19th century publishing milieu, various reform movements, and major historical events, such as the Civil War. It also treats her writings, both the adult and children's works, in an accurate, informative, and accessible manner. The volume includes more than 600 alphabetically arranged entries. Each entry discusses the topic's relevance to Alcott's life and current scholarship about her. Many of the entries close with brief bibliographies, and the book concludes with a list of works for further reading.Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2001
Toni Morrison
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The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison by Toni Morrison has written some of the most significant and demanding fiction of the modern age. Her dazzling depictions of African-American experience are studied in high schools and colleges, debated in the media and analyzed by scholars at an astounding rate. This Introduction offers readers a guide to the world of Morrison in all its complexity, from her status as a key player on the global intellectual stage to her unique perspective on American history and her innovative narrative techniques. Covering every novel from The Bluest Eye to A Mercy, Tessa Roynon combines close readings with critical insights into Morrison's other creative work, such as short stories, libretto and song lyrics and unpublished pieces for performance. Lively and accessibly written, Roynon's insightful text is ideal for readers approaching Morrison for the first time as well as those familiar with her work.Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2012 -
The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison is one of the most widely studied of contemporary American authors. Her novels, particularly Beloved, have had a dramatic impact on the American canon and attracted considerable critical commentary. This 2007 Companion introduces and examines her oeuvre as a whole, the first evaluation to include not only her famous novels, but also her other literary works (short story, drama, musical, and opera), her social and literary criticism, and her career as an editor and teacher. Innovative contributions from internationally recognized critics and academics discuss Morrison's themes, narrative techniques, language and political philosophy, and explain the importance of her work to American studies and world literature. This comprehensive and accessible approach, together with a chronology and guide to further reading, makes this an essential book for students and scholars of African American literature.Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2007 -
Toni Morrison's Fiction: Revised and Expanded Edition by In this revised introduction to Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's novels, Jan Furman extends and updates her critical commentary. New chapters on four novels following the publication of Jazz in 1992 continue Furman's explorations of Morrison's themes and narrative strategies. In all Furman surveys ten works that include the trilogy novels, a short story, and a book of criticism to identify Morrison's recurrent concern with the destructive tensions that define human experience: the clash of gender and authority, the individual and community, race and national identity, culture and authenticity, and the self and other. As Furman demonstrates, Morrison more often than not renders meaning for characters and readers through an unflinching inquiry, if not resolution, of these enduring conflicts. She is not interested in tidy solutions. Enlightened self-love, knowledge, and struggle, even without the promise of salvation, are the moral measure of Morrison's characters, fiction, and literary imagination. Tracing Morrison's developing art and her career as a public intellectual, Furman examines the novels in order of publication. She also decodes their collective narrative chronology, which begins in the late seventeenth century and ends in the late twentieth century, as Morrison delineates three hundred years of African American experience. In Furman's view Morrison tells new and difficult stories of old, familiar histories such as the making of Colonial America and the racing of American society. In the final chapters Furman pays particular attention to form, noting Morrison's continuing practice of the kind of "deep" novelistic structure that transcends plot and imparts much of a novel's meaning. Furman demonstrates, through her helpful analyses, how engaging such innovations can be.Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2014-06-06 -
Toni Morrison: Writing the Moral Imagination by This compelling study explores the inextricable links between theNobel laureate?s aesthetic practice and her political vision,through an analysis of the key texts as well as her lesser-studiedworks, books for children, and most recent novels. Offers provocative new insights and a refreshingly originalcontribution to the scholarship of one of the most importantcontemporary American writers Analyzes the celebrated fiction of Morrison in relation to hercritical writing about the process of reading and writingliterature, the relationship between readers and writers, and thecultural contributions of African-American literature Features extended analyses of Morrison?s lesser-knownworks, most recent novels, and books for children as well as thekey textsLocation: OnlinePublication Date: 2012
Emily Dickinson
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Emily Dickinson's Poems: As She Preserved Them by Cristanne Miller's major edition of Dickinson's poems presents the 1,100 poems the poet retained during her lifetime, in the form she retained them. Dickinson took pains to copy these poems onto folded sheets in fair hand, arguably to preserve them for posterity. Included are Dickinson's alternate phrases and the editor's notes and Introduction.Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2016 -
The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson by This collection of Emily Dickinson's work contains 444 of the nearly 1,800 poems that the prolific yet reclusive American poet privately penned during her lifetime. Although her bold and non-traditional writing style met with mixed reviews when first published, Dickinson is now considered one of America's greatest poets. Included here are such famous poems as "Because I could not stop for Death", "I'm nobody! Who are you?", and "Hope is the thing with feathers". Themes of love, loss, death, and immortality imbue Dickinson's work with a timeless quality; her unconventional poetry continues to provide insight into the human condition. This is an unabridged compilation of three series of Dickinson's poetry edited and published by her friends after her death--the first series in 1890, the second in 1891, and the third in 1896.Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2016 -
A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson by One of America's most celebrated women, Emily Dickinson was virtually unpublished in her own time and unknown to the public at large. Today her poetry is commonly anthologized and widely praised for its precision, its intensity, its depth and beauty. Dickinson's life and work, however, remain in important ways mysterious. This collection of essays, all of them previously unpublished, represent the best of contemporary scholarship and points the way toward exciting new directions for the future. The volume includes a biographical essay that covers some of the major turning points in the poet's life, especially those emphasized by her letters. Other essays discuss Dickinson's religious beliefs, her response to the Civil War, her class-based politics, her place in a tradition of American women's poetry, and the editing of her manuscripts. A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson concludes with a rich bibliographical essay describing the controversial history of Dickinson's life in print, together with a substantial bibliography of relevant sources.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2004 -
Reading Emily Dickinson's Letters: Critical Essays by This text introduces the methods of applied functional analysis and applied convexity. Suitable for advanced undergraduates and graduate students of mathematics, science, and technology, it focuses on the solutions to two closely related problems. The first concerns finding roots of systems of equations and operative equations in a given region. The second involves extremal problems of minimizing or maximizing functions defined on subsets of finite and infinite dimensional spaces. Rather than citing practical algorithms for solving problems, this treatment provides the tools for studying problem-related algorithms. Topics include iterations and fixed points, metric spaces, nonlinear programming, polyhedral convex programming, and infinite convex programming. Additional subjects include linear spaces and convex sets and applications to integral equations. Students should be familiar with advanced calculus and linear algebra. As an introduction to elementary functional analysis motivated by application, this volume also constitutes a helpful reference for theoretically minded engineers, scientists, and applied mathematicians.Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2009 -
Our Emily Dickinsons: American Women Poets and the Intimacies of Difference by For Vivian R. Pollak, Emily Dickinson's work is an extended meditation on the risks of social, psychological, and aesthetic difference that would be taken up by the generations of women poets who followed her. She situates Dickinson's originality in relation to her nineteenth-century audiences, including poet, novelist, and Indian rights activist Helen Hunt Jackson and her controversial first editor, Mabel Loomis Todd, and traces the emergence of competing versions of a brilliant but troubled Dickinson in the twentieth century, especially in the writings of Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, and Elizabeth Bishop. Pollak reveals the wide range of emotions exhibited by women poets toward Dickinson's achievement and chronicles how their attitudes toward her changed over time. She contends, however, that they consistently use Dickinson to clarify personal and professional battles of their own. Reading poems, letters, diaries, journals, interviews, drafts of published and unpublished work, and other historically specific primary sources, Pollak tracks nineteenth- and twentieth-century women poets' ambivalence toward a literary tradition that overvalued lyric's inwardness and undervalued the power of social connection. Our Emily Dickinsons places Dickinson's life and work within the context of larger debates about gender, sexuality, and literary authority in America and complicates the connections between creative expression, authorial biography, audience reception, and literary genealogy.Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2016 -
Dickinson Unbound: Paper, Process, Poetics by In Dickinson Unbound, Alexandra Socarides takes readers on a journey through the actual steps and stages of Emily Dickinson's creative process. In chapters that deftly balance attention to manuscripts, readings of poems, and a consideration of literary and material culture, Socarides takes upeach of the five major stages of Dickinson's writing career: copying poems onto folded sheets of stationery; inserting and embedding poems into correspondence; sewing sheets together to make fascicles; scattering loose sheets; and copying lines on often torn and discarded pieces of household paper.In so doing, Socarides reveals a Dickinsonian poetics starkly different from those regularly narrated by literary history.Here, Dickinson is transformed from an elusive poetic genius whose poems we have interpreted in a vacuum into an author who employed surprising (and, at times, surprisingly conventional) methods to wholly new effect. Dickinson Unbound gives us a Dickinson at once more accessible and more complexthan previously imagined. As the first authoritative study of Dickinson's material and compositional methods, this book not only transforms our ways of reading Dickinson, but advocates for a critical methodology that insists on the study of manuscripts, composition, and material culture for poetryof the nineteenth century and thereafter.Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2012-07-16 -
Dickinson in Her Own Time: : A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates by Even before the first books of her poems were published in the 1890s, friends, neighbors, and even apparently strangers knew Emily Dickinson was a writer of remarkable verses. Featuring both well-known documents and material printed or collected here for the first time, this book offers a broad range of writings that convey impressions of Dickinson in her own time and for the first decades following the publication of her poems. It all begins with her school days and continues to the centennial of her birth in 1930. In addition, promotional items, reviews, and correspondence relating to early publications are included, as well as some later documents that reveal the changing assessments of Dickinson's poetry in response to evolving critical standards. These documents provide evidence that counters many popular conceptions of her life and reception, such as the belief that the writer best known for poems focused on loss, death, and immortality was herself a morose soul. In fact, those who knew her found her humorous, playful, and interested in other people. Dickinson maintained literary and personal correspondence with major representatives of the national literary scene, developing a reputation as a remarkable writer even as she maintained extreme levels of privacy. Evidence compiled here also demonstrates that she herself made considerable provision for the survival of her poems and laid the groundwork for their eventual publication. Dickinson in Her Own Time reveals the poet as her contemporaries knew her, before her legend took hold.Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2016-01-01 -
Lives Like Loaded Guns : Emily Dickinson and her family's feuds by In 1882, Emily Dickinson's brother Austin began a passionate love affair with Mabel Todd, a young Amherst faculty wife, setting in motion a series of events that would forever change the lives of the Dickinson family. The feud that erupted as a result has continued for over a century. Lyndall Gordon, an award-winning biographer, tells the riveting story of the Dickinsons, and reveals Emily as a very different woman from the pale, lovelorn recluse that exists in the popular imagination. Thanks to unprecedented use of letters, diaries, and legal documents, Gordon digs deep into the life and work of Emily Dickinson, to reveal the secret behind the poet's insistent seclusion, and presents a woman beyond her time who found love, spiritual sustenance, and immortality all on her own terms. An enthralling story of creative genius, filled with illicit passion and betrayal, Lives Like Loaded Guns is sure to cause a stir among Dickinson's many devoted readers and scholars.Location: Mugar Stacks PS1541.Z5 G66 2010Publication Date: 2010 -
A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century by PEN/ Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Longlist O, The Oprah Magazine "Best Books of Summer" selection "Magnetic nonfiction." --O, The Oprah Magazine "Remarkable insight . . . [a] unique meditation/investigation. . . . Jerome Charyn the unpredictable, elusive, and enigmatic is a natural match for Emily Dickinson, the quintessence of these." --Joyce Carol Oates, author ofWild Nights! andThe Lost Landscape We think we know Emily Dickinson: the Belle of Amherst, virginal, reclusive, and possibly mad. But inA Loaded Gun, Jerome Charyn introduces us to a different Emily Dickinson: the fierce, brilliant, and sexually charged poet who wrote: My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun-- ... Though I than He-- may longer live He longer must--than I-- For I have but the power to kill, Without--the power to die-- Through interviews with contemporary scholars, close readings of Dickinson's correspondence and handwritten manuscripts, and a suggestive, newly discovered photograph that is purported to show Dickinson with her lover, Charyn's literary sleuthing reveals the great poet in ways that have only been hinted at previously: as a woman who was deeply philosophical, intensely engaged with the world, attracted to members of both sexes, and able to write poetry that disturbs and delights us today. Jerome Charyn is the author of, most recently,Bitter Bronx: Thirteen Stories,I Am Abraham: A Novel of Lincoln and the Civil War, andThe Secret Life of Emily Dickinson: A Novel. He lives in New York.Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2016
Sylvia Plath
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Sylvia Plath's Fiction: A Critical Study by This is the first study devoted to Sylvia Plath's fiction. Plath wrote fiction throughout her life, in a wide variety of genres, including women's magazine romances, New Yorker stories, comedy, social criticism, autobiography, teenage fiction and science fiction. She wrote novels before andafter The Bell Jar.Discussing all these novels and stories, and based on research in the three major archives of her work, this book is the complete study of Plath's fiction. The author analyses her influences as a fiction writer, the relationships between her poetry and fiction, the political views she expresses inher fiction, and devotes two chapters to the central concern of her novels and stories, the roles of women in contemporary society.Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2012 -
Representing Sylvia Plath by Interest in Sylvia Plath continues to grow, as does the mythic status of her relationship with Ted Hughes, but Plath is a poet of enduring power in her own right. This book explores the many layers of her often unreliable and complex representations and the difficult relationship between the reader and her texts. The volume evaluates the historical, familial and cultural sources which Plath drew upon for material: from family photographs, letters and personal history to contemporary literary and cinematic holocaust texts. It examines Plath's creative processes: what she does with materials ranging from Romantic paintings to women's magazine fiction, how she transforms these in multiple drafts and the tools she uses to do this, including her use of colour. Finally the book investigates specific instances when Plath herself becomes the subject matter for other artists, writers, film makers and biographers.Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2011 -
Claiming Sylvia Plath: The Poet as Exemplary Figure by Over the years, Sylvia Plath has come to inhabit a contested area of cultural production with other ambiguous authors between the highbrow, the middlebrow, and the popular. Claiming Sylvia Plath is a critical and comprehensive reception study of what has been written about Plath from 1960 to 2010. Academic and popular interest in her seems incessant, verging on a public obsession. The story of Sylvia Plath is not only the story of a writer and her texts, but also of the readers who have tried to make sense of her life and work. A religious tone and a rhetoric of accountability dominate among the devoted. Questing for the real or true Sylvia, they share a sense of posessiveness towards outsiders or those who deviate from what they see as a correct approach to the poet. In order to offer a new and more nuanced perspective on Plath's public image, the reception has been organized into interpretive communities composed of critics, feminists, biographers, psychologists, and friends. Pertinent questions are raised about how the poet functions as an excemplary figure, and how - and by whom - she is used to further theories, politics, careers, and a number of other causes. Ethical issues and rhetorical strategies consequently loom high in Claiming Sylvia Plath. The book may be employed both as a guide to the massive body of Plath literature and as a history of a changing critical doxa. Why Sylvia Plath has been serviceable to so many and open to colonization is another way of asking why she keeps on fascinating all kinds of readers worldwide. Claiming Sylvia Plath suggests a host of possible answers. It includes an extensive Plath bibliography.Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2013
Librarian
Barbara Maratos
Contact:
Boston University Libraries
bkmarato@bu.edu
bkmarato@bu.edu
Subjects: Language & Linguistics, Literature