During William Gilmore Simms’s life (1806–1870), book reviews and critical essays became vital parts of American literary culture and intellectual discourse. Simms was an assiduous reviewer and essayist, proving by example the importance of those genres. William Gilmore Simms’s Selected Reviews on Literature and Civilization publishes for the first time in book form sixty-two examples of the writer’s hundreds of newspaper and periodical reviews and book notes as well as four important critical essays.  Together, the reviews and essays reveal the regional, national, and international dimensions of Simms’s intellectual interests.To frame the two distinct parts of Selected Reviews, James Everett Kibler, Jr., and David Moltke-Hansen have written a general introduction that considers the development of book reviewing and the authorship of essays in cultural and historical contexts. In part one, Kibler offers an introduction that examines Simms’s reviewing habits and the aesthetic and critical values that informed the author’s reviews. Kibler then publishes selected texts of reviews and provides historical and cultural backgrounds for each selection. Simms was an early proponent of the critical theories of Romantics such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Edgar Allan Poe. Widely read in European history and literature, he reviewed works published in French, German, and classics in original Greek and Latin and in translation. Simms also was an early, ardent advocate of works of local color and of southern “backwoods” humorists of his day. Simms published notices of seven of Herman Melville’s novels, the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and favorably reviewed Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods.Simms published numerous review essays of twenty thousand or more words in literary journals and also republished two collections in book form. These volumes treated such subjects as Americanism in literature and the American Revolution in South Carolina. Yet, as part two of Selected Reviews demonstrates, Simms ranged much more widely in the intellectual milieu. Such cultural and political topics as the 1848 revolution in France, the history of the literary essay, the roles of women in the American Revolution, and the activities of the southern convention in Nashville in 1850 captured Simms’s attention. Moltke-Hansen’s introduction to part two examines Simms’s roles in, and responses to, the Romantic critical revolution and the other revolutions then roiling Europe and America.

Wild Mother Dancing challenges the historical absence of the mother, who, as subject and character, has been repeatedly suppressed and edited out of the literary canon. In her search for sources for telling the new (or old, forbidden story) against a tradition of narrative absence, Brandt turns to Canadian fiction representing a varety of cultural traditions — Margaret Laurence, Daphne Marlatt, Jovette Marchessault, Joy Kogawa, Sky Lee — and a collection of oral interviews about childbirth told by Mennonite women. The results broaden, enrich, and finally recover the motherstory in ways that have revolutionary implications for our institutions and imaginations.

Part survey of the field of Indigenous literary studies, part cultural history, and part literary polemic, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter asserts the vital significance of literary expression to the political, creative, and intellectual efforts of Indigenous peoples today. In considering the connections between literature and lived experience, this book contemplates four key questions at the heart of Indigenous kinship traditions: How do we learn to be human? How do we become good relatives? How do we become good ancestors? How do we learn to live together? Blending personal narrative and broader historical and cultural analysis with close readings of key creative and critical texts, Justice argues that Indigenous writers engage with these questions in part to challenge settler-colonial policies and practices that have targeted Indigenous connections to land, history, family, and self. More importantly, Indigenous writers imaginatively engage the many ways that communities and individuals have sought to nurture these relationships and project them into the future. This provocative volume challenges readers to critically consider and rethink their assumptions about Indigenous literature, history, and politics while never forgetting the emotional connections of our shared humanity and the power of story to effect personal and social change. Written with a generalist reader firmly in mind, but addressing issues of interest to specialists in the field, this book welcomes new audiences to Indigenous literary studies while offering more seasoned readers a renewed appreciation for these transformative literary traditions.

Ted Geisel loved to doodle from the time he was a kid. He had an offbeat, fun-loving personality. He often threw dinner parties where guests wore outrageous hats! And he donned quirky hats when thinking up ideas for books-like his classic The Cat in the Hat. This biography brings an amazingly gifted author/illustrator to life.

“We look around and feel as if book culture as we know it is crumbling to dust, but there’s one important thing to keep in mind: as we know it.” What happens if we separate the idea of "the book" from the experience it has traditionally provided? Lynn Coady challenges booklovers addicted to the physical book to confront their darkest fears about the digital world and the future of reading. Is the all-pervasive internet turning readers into web-surfing automatons and books themselves into museum pieces? The bogeyman of technological change has haunted humans ever since Plato warned about the dangers of the written word, and every generation is convinced its youth will bring about the end of civilization. In Who Needs Books?, Coady suggests that, even though digital advances have long been associated with the erosion of literacy, recent technologies have not debased our culture as much as they have simply changed the way we read.

One Friday, Walter Dohaney, novelist M.T. (Jean) Dohaney's husband, went out as usual to play hockey with his friends. She never saw him alive again. Without warning, Jean was plunged into the most painful and disorienting experience of her life. Faced with a tumult of emotions and sudden responsibilities, she turned to her writing for solace and began a journal. In her journal, Dohaney's sharp sense of humour and her impatience with conventional pieties lay bare the depth of her bereavement, yet at the same time they express the life force within her. She is frank about her anger at Walt for playing hockey despite his heart condition and for not being there to take care of the house and family; she faces her annoyance at sincere well-wishers who say exactly the wrong thing; and she exposes her distressing loneliness. When Things Get Back to Normal is a compassionate yet bracing companion for those struck down by loss, which indirectly gives practical advice about the changes that come with widowhood. Two years after her husband's death, Jean agreed to publish her journal. When Things Get Back to Normal gained critical acclaim when it was first published in 1989, but its finest praise came from the dozens of people who wrote and called to tell the author how it had helped them through their own grief. When Jean's novel A Fit Month for Dying was released in 2000, the publicity surrounding the book prompted a flurry of phone calls to the publisher from people seeking copies of When Things Get Back to Normal. During the next year Goose Lane Editions sought out and acquired the book. The new edition will be released in March of this year, due in no small part to the many readers who took the book, and Jean Dohaney, into their hearts. Author Helen Fogwill Porter was one of the many that found strength in When Things Get Back to Normal when her husband died, and her introduction to this new edition offers her own experience of "normalcy." Jean Dohaney's new afterword tells where she is now, fifteen years after Walt's death.

What exactly is a primary source? How does it compare to other types of sources? Emerging readers need to know the difference. Readers will also be introduced to the concept of plagiarism, how to choose sources for their writing and reports, checking source dates and accuracy, and more. Straightforward, neutral text and vivid photographs provide readers with the tools they need to learn about types of sources, including primary sources, how sources connect to media literacy, and understanding ownership of work.

At a time when people must work harder than ever to stand out from the crowd, the word creativity can seem vague and overused. But what exactly is creativity? Adrian McKerracher travels from Vancouver to Havana to Buenos Aires, leading readers on a journey to discover poignant new insights into a life of letters. Through encounters with artists of all kinds, famous or obscure, McKerracher traces a socio-cultural history of the meaning of writing, each vignette a meditation on the way that metaphor limits and liberates understanding: creativity is a process, a possession, a relation, an algorithm, a game, and more. But What It Means to Write is far more than an archive of the figurative. Along the way, a labyrinth of chance reunites McKerracher with old friends, threatens him with violence, and invites him to remain forever in a place both real and imagined. His journey from cafés to libraries to late-night living rooms embodies the structure of a bold new methodology for interpreting creativity, demonstrating the tools for working productively with ambiguity and rebuilding meaning, one metaphor at a time. Told in character-driven narrative pulses that reflect on the nature of belonging, understanding, and loving, What It Means to Write is a celebration of the possibilities of both language and silence.

An emerging Lakota scholar's critical interrogation of settler-colonial nations that re-centers Oceti Sakowin (Dakota) women as the tribe's traditional culture keepers and bearers. We Are the Stars is a literary recovery project that seeks to reconstruct a genealogy of Oceti Sakowin (Dakota) literature, and study in-depth the linkages between settler colonialism, literature, nationalism, and gender via analysis of tribal and settler colonial narratives about women and land. Sarah Hernandez begins by exploring how settler colonizers used the printing press and boarding schools to displace Oceti Sakowin women as traditional culture keepers and bearers, with the goal of assimilating completely the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota nations. She then shifts her focus to decolonization, exploring how contemporary Oceti Sakowin writers and scholars have started to reclaim Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota literatures to decolonize and heal their families, communities, and nations.