During the 1870s, the organization and stewardship of American culture by the upper classes began to take hold on a mass scale, due in part to the founding of museums, municipal libraries, symphony halls, theaters, and public parks. In addition, periodicals such as Scribner’s Magazine, Harper’s Monthly Magazine, and The Atlantic Monthly became major players in shaping the country’s cultural ideals. Founded in 1870, Scribner’s Monthly: An Illustrated Magazine for the People, which became The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine in 1881, offered its predominantly upper-middle-class readership historical and biographical essays, serialized novels, scientific and technological updates, and discussions of contemporary events and issues, such as woman suffrage, Chinese immigration, labor strikes, and “the Negro problem.”

The basic tenet here is that we do not translate words, but texts, and that these competing models can be integrated into a more global theory of translation by viewing the translation process as a primarily textual process. The authors examine in detail the characteristics that make a good translation a text, focusing particularly on the empirical relationship between the theory of translation and it’s practice.

Although C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) achieved a level of popularity as a fiction writer, literary scholars have tended to view him as a minor figure working in an insignificant genre-science fiction-or have pigeonholed him as a Christian apologist and moralist. In C. S. Lewis in Context, Doris T. Myers places his work in the literary milieu of his times and the public context of language rather than in the private realm of personal habits or relationships.

John Marr and Other Sailors is a complete facsimile reprint of the original edition as Melville published it that also offers additional materials that allow readers to study the book as Melville conceived it. Robillard provides excerpts from the author’s manuscript, printer’s copy with corrections, the galley proofs with Melville’s instructions about the structure of the book, and the page proofs, thereby offering a complete record of one of his books from manuscript to print. Many scholars have been dismissive of Melville’s poetry and his writing during the last years of his life. But Melville was a hard-working, professional writer during his later years, writing new poems and changing and correcting older poems. As evident in this edition, he was distilling the hard-earned knowledge of many years and the poetic skills he had been perfecting. For this reason, John Marr is as important as any of his prose fictions.

In Conundrums for the Long Week-End, Robert McGregor and Ethan Lewis explore how Sayers used her fictional hero to comment on, and come to terms with, the social upheaval of the time: world wars, the crumbling of the privileged aristocracy, the rise of democracy, and the expanding struggle of women for equality.

Scholars from around the world met in Volos, Greece, to discuss the work of American writer and international traveler, Herman Melville. The papers presented at this conference reflected a variety of interdisciplinary, international, and intergenerational perspectives. With the participation of esteemed Melville studies, this unique conference afforded all who attended an overview of current approaches […]

This volume collects essays and documents from a wide selection of sources—many now out of print and difficult to locate—to provide a highly readable story of the settlement and development of the “New Connecticut” region of Ohio. Four divisions in the book logically organize the social, economic, and political study of the region: “Conquest and Settlement: Native Americans to New Englanders”; “The Pioneers: Town Building, Society, and the Emergence of an Economy”; “The Transition Years; Slavery, the Civil War, and the Reserve in National Politics, 1850-1880”; and “A Changing Legacy: Industrialism, Ethnicity, and the Age of Reform.” The volume ends in 1920, when the unique features of the Western Reserve of Ohio—the architecture, the landmarks, the New England lifestyle—had largely faded into American history as a result of industrialism, urbanism, and the pressure of a changing ethnic base.

This critical study of Sherwood Anderson’s most famous and perhaps most widely taught work, Winesburg, Ohio, treats it as a thoroughly modernist novel examining the aesthetic nature of romantic identity. This first sustained critical analysis of this American classic restores Anderson to the top rank of American artists, placing him alongside other intense scrutinizers of American romanticism: Hawthorne, Melville, and Hemingway.

We see here something of the hypnotic quality of Charles Williams’ character and may obtain from it a deep if glancing insight into his extremely vulnerable humanity. At times a painful document, Letters to Lalage is of the greatest value in illuminating some of the more troubled aspects of a Christian writer and teacher who, more convincingly than most, could evoke the nature of joy—and who could induce joy in other people, however precariously he may have been aware of it himself. Most especially this book gives one an insight into the price Charles Williams paid (and unwittingly exacted) for his particular gifts and vision.

These letters to “Michal,” Williams endearing name for his wife, from “Serge,” a moniker by which his most intimate friends addressed him, are more than just a collection of love letters—they are significant for what they tell us about the man, for the light they throw on his work, and for the way they show Williams in the context of his literary contemporaries (C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Dorothy L. Sayers, Christopher Fry, and Edith Sitwell). In fact, Williams felt that T. S. Eliot and C. S. Lewis were the only two people other than his wife to whom he could talk seriously about important matters.