Charles Williams has achieved considerable reputation for his novels. He has been recognized as a brilliant theologian and a sensitive literary critic. But Williams himself wished most to be remembered as a poet, and trusted his future literary reputation to the two-volume series of poems on the Arthurian theme, Taliessin Through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars. The emphasis in this study is on the quality of these poems as poetry and only secondarily upon their religious content. Although essentially Christian, they are placed within the context of the multifaceted, many-changing forms of recurring myths. Thus they represent one of the few attempts in the twentieth century to encapsulate and age-old and ever-recurring “pattern in the web” in a brilliant structure that is thoroughly modern.

Hunting the Unicorn is the first treatment to discuss the entire body of Pitter’s verse. It will appeal to scholars and general readers as it places Pitter into the overall context of twentieth-century British poetry and portrays a rather modest, hardworking woman who also “witnessed” the world through the lens of a gifted poet.

In C.S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse Don W. King contends that Lewis’s poetic aspirations enhanced his prose and helped make him the master stylist so revered by the literary world. With its careful examination of early diaries and letters, and the inclusion of four of Lewis’s previously unpublished narrative poems and eleven of his previously unpublished short poems, this important book explains the man through his writing and considers how Lewis’s lifelong devotion to poetry is best realized in his works of prose. Readers and admirers of Lewis will certainly find their understanding of his writing greatly enhanced by this perceptive book.

Sayer’s three main accomplishments serve as the organizing principle of this book: first, her transformation of the modern detective story into a serious novel of social criticism and moral depth; second, her penetrating critique of the situation of modern women; and finally her compelling work as a lay theologian and interpreter of Christianity. Thus, the book proceeds not only in roughly chronological order, but also from the work that most readers know best what they know least. The author assumes some familiarity with Sayer’s fiction, but The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers is not intended for specialists alone. Indeed, it is appropriate for the same reader that DLS had in mind when she wrote. It will appeal to those who already admire her work, and it may bring others to appreciate her as a literary figure of importance.

The novels of Charles Brockden Brown, the most accomplished literary figure in early America, redefined the gothic genre and helped shape some of America’s greatest writers, including Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. However, little has been said about the latter years of Brown’s career. While his early novels are celebrated for their innovative and experimental style, Brown’s later historical narratives are often dismissed as uninteresting, and Brown himself has been accused of having become “a stodgy conservative.”

Volume 2, Ourika and Its Progeny, contains the original translation of Claire de Duras’s Ourika as well as a series of original critical essays by twenty-first-century scholars. First published anonymously in 1823, Ourika signifies an important shift from nineteenth-century notions of race, nationality, and kinship toward the identity politics of today. Editors Kadish and Massardier-Kenney and their contributors review the impact of the novel and abolitionist narrative, poetry, and theater in the context of translation studies.

Translating Slavery explores the complex interrelationships that exist between translation, gender, and race by focusing on antislavery writing by or about French women in the French revolutionary period. Now in a two-volume collection, Translating Slavery closely examines what happens when translators translate and when writers treat issues of gender and race. The volumes explore the theoretical, linguistic, and literary complexities involved when white writers, especially women, took up their pens to denounce the injustices to which blacks were subjected under slavery.

In what became The Garden of Eden, Hemingway’s character David Bourne identifies his writing process as the creation of a new, forbidden country, asking himself the questions that drove Hemingway’s own writing, “So where do you go? I don’t know. And what will you find? I don’t know. The bones of the others I suppose.” Justice’s investigations into Hemingway’s creative method illuminate the map of Hemingway’s forbidden country, revealing his writing as a lifelong simultaneous expression of present and past. Justice locates the power of Hemingway’s fiction in this duality—in the paradoxical compulsions toward destruction and creation, lamentation and hope, and fear and love.

Annie Dillard, a foremost practitioner of the literary epiphany, has become a representative of a necromantic movement that combines the ecological interest of wilderness literature with the aesthetics of a highly stylized literature. This first full-length study of the Pulitzer prize-winning essayist considers her as wilderness philosopher, religious mystic, professional critic, and arch-romantic.

Selected Works of Elinor Wylie contains 113 of the 161 poems Wylie chose for the volumes published in her lifetime and 100 more that appeared in Collected Poems and in Last Poems. Also included are the first chapters of each of her novels, Jennifer Lorn, The Venetian Glass Nephew, The Orphan Angel, and Mr. Hodge and Mr. Hazard. Editor and scholar Evelyn Hively chose short stories, essays, reviews, and articles to further define Wylie’s rich and broad repertoire and her place on the 1920s literary scene. Scholars and researchers of this modern woman writer and her contemporaries will find this a welcome addition to women’s literary studies.