Janice Brown examines Sayer’s major works, beginning with her early poetry and moving through her works of fiction to the dramas, essays, and lectures written in the last years of her life. She illustrates how Sayers used popular genres to teach about sin and redemption, how she redefined the Seven Deadly Sins for the twentieth century, why she stopped writing mysteries, and her application of the concepts of sin and redemption to society as a whole.

Arthur Mervyn has long puzzled students and scholars with its seeming diffuseness, resulting from its original serial publication. Critics agree, however, that the power of this novel lies not so much in its portrait of “right virtue,” which was Brown’s primary aim, as in its realistic descriptions of the yellow fever epidemic and the ensuing panic that swept Philadelphia in the summer of 1793. The ambiguities of Arthur Mervyn’s character and the precarious nature of the revolutionary 1790s make this novel a particularly apt subject for lively discussion and future scholarship and make this revised edition an excellent classroom text.

This volume contains a critical edition of Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly, the third of his novels to be published in 1799 and the first to deal with the American wilderness. The basis of the text is the first edition, printed and published by Hugh Maxwell in Philadelphia late in the year, but the “Fragment” printed independently in Brown’s Monthly Magazine earlier in 1799 supplies some readings in Chapters 17-20. The Historical Essay, which follows the text, covers matters of composition, publication, historical background, and literary evaluation, and the Textual Essay discusses the transmission of the text, choice of copy-text, and editorial policy. A general textual statement for the entire edition appears in Volume I of the series.

This first volume in Kent State University’s Bicentennial Edition of the Novels and Related Works of Charles Brockden Brown presents critical texts of Brown’s first published novel, Wieland, and of the fragment, “Carwin,” which he began in 1798 as a companion-piece to his novel. The texts are based on the first printings: the book edition of Wieland printed by T. and J. Swords in New York and published there by Hocquet Caritat in 1798, and the installments of “Carwin” that appeared in the Literary Magazine in Philadelphia in 1803, 1804, and 1805.

This new study reveals that the nineteen stories that comprised the original Tales of Soldiers and Civilians consist of carefully developed and interrelated meanings and themes that can only be fully understood by examining the complex circumstances of their original productions. By considering each of the nineteen tales in the order in which they were first published and by drawing heavily on contemporary related materials, Blume re-creates much of the original milieu into which Bierce carefully placed his short stories. Blume systematically examines many of Bierce’s editing flaws, exposing that Bierce’s decisions often weakened the original literary merits of his stories. Ultimately this story reveals, tale by tale and layer by layer, that the nineteen stories included in Bierce’s 1892 collection were masterpieces of fiction, destined to become classics. Historians and Civil War enthusiasts, as well as literary scholars, will welcome this new study.

In Evolution and “the Sex Problem” author Bert Bender argues that Darwin’s theories of sexual selection and of the emotions are essential elements in American fiction from the late 1800s through the 1950s, particularly during the Freudian era and the years surrounding the Scopes trial.

Using a variety of methodologies and approaches—postcolonial theory, cultural studies, linguistics, performance theory—“Whole Oceans Away” offers a valuable body of criticism for students of nineteenth-century American literature and history, cultural studies, and Pacific Rim studies.

Fiction as Fact: “The Horse Soldiers” and Popular Memory is a thorough examination of this famous military action through three genres—Dee Brown’s 1954 historical account, Grierson’s Raid; Harold Sinclair’s 1956 novel The Horse Soldiers; and John Ford’s 1959 film The Horse Soldiers. Neil Longley York demonstrates how historical “truths” are often omitted, fragmented, and altered before being assimilated into popular culture and how the events of our past are often molded to fit the constraints of the present.

“Over the years Zimmer’s poems have consistently been full of good sense and buoyant humor. Now he has kicked it up some notches and, using his poetic skills, made this sad, funny, quite serious book of prose about trains, childhood, war, education, drinking, jazz, wooden sheds, grass, elephants, the moon, blues, horses, sickness, and so many other things that come together as a satisfying whole. It is a great pleasure to turn these lyrical, finely-written pages.”—Annie Dillard

In Charles Williams: Alchemy and Integration, Gavin Ashenden explores both the history behind the myths and metaphysics Williams was to make his own and the hermetic culture that influenced him. He examines and interprets its expressions in Williams’s novels, poetry, and the development of his ideas and relates these elements to Williams’s unpublished letters to his platonic lover, Celia, written toward the end of his life. Since one of the foremost ideas in Williams’s work is the interdependence or coinherence of both our humanity and the creation, understanding the extent to which he lived and achieved this in his own life is important. Williams’s private correspondence with Celia is of particular interest both for its own sake, since it was previously unknown, and for the insight it offers into his personality and muse.