Yale Studies in English publishes books on English, American, and Anglophone literature developed in and by the Yale University community. Founded in 1898 by Albert Stanburrough Cook to publish distinguished dissertations, the original series continued into the 1970’s, producing such titles as The Poetry of Meditation by Louis Martz, Shelley’s Mythmaking by Harold Bloom, The Cankered Muse by Alvin Kernan, The Hero of the Waverly Novels by Alexander Welsh, John Skelton’s Poetry by Stanley Fish, and Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and his Roles by Stephen Greenblatt. With the goal of encouraging the publication of first books by emerging scholars in the company of work by established colleagues, the series has been revived for the 21 st century with support by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and in partnership with Yale University Press. Recent Yale Ph.D.’s who are interested in this series should contact the YSE chair, currently Joseph Roach, about procedures for submission.
Recent titles published by YSE:
The Virtue of Sympathy: Magic, Philosophy, and Literature in Seventeenth-Century England
Seth Lobis
Yale University Press | October 2014
ISBN: 978-0300192032
Beginning with an analysis of Shakespeare’s The Tempestand building to a new reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost, author Seth Lobis charts a profound change in the cultural meaning of sympathy during the seventeenth century. Having long referred to magical affinities in the universe, sympathy was increasingly understood to be a force of connection between people. By examining sympathy in literary and philosophical writing of the period, Lobis illuminates an extraordinary shift in human understanding.
The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of East and West
R. John Williams
Yale University Press | June 2014
ISBN: 978-0300194470
Winner of the 2012 Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication.
The famous 1893 Chicago World’s Fair celebrated the dawn of corporate capitalism and a new Machine Age with an exhibit of the world’s largest engine. Yet the noise was so great, visitors ran out of the Machinery Hall to retreat to the peace and quiet of the Japanese pavilion’s Buddhist temples and lotus ponds. Thus began over a century of the West’s turn toward an Asian aesthetic as an antidote to modern technology.
From the turn-of-the-century Columbian Exhibition to the latest Zen-inspired designs of Apple, Inc., R. John Williams charts the history of our embrace of Eastern ideals of beauty to counter our fear of the rise of modern technological systems. In a dazzling work of synthesis, Williams examines Asian influences on book design and department store marketing, the commercial fiction of Jack London, the poetic technique of Ezra Pound, the popularity of Charlie Chan movies, the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, and the design of the latest high-tech gadgets. Williams demonstrates how, rather than retreating from modernity, writers, artists, and inventors turned to traditional Eastern technê as a therapeutic means of living with—but never abandoning—Western technology.
The Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past
Anthony Welch
Yale University Press | November 2012
ISBN: 978-0300178869
This book explores why Renaissance epic poetry clung to fictions of song and oral performance in an age of growing literacy. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets, Anthony Welch argues, came to view their written art as newly distinct from the oral cultures of their ancestors. Welch shows how the period’s writers imagined lost civilizations built on speech and song—from Homeric Greece and Celtic Britain to the Americas—and struggled to reconcile this oral inheritance with an early modern culture of the book. Welch’s wide-ranging study offers a new perspective on Renaissance Europe’s epic literature and its troubled relationship with antiquity.
Uncloseting Drama: American Modernism and Queer Performance
Nicholas Salvato
Yale University Press | October 2010
ISBN: 978-0300155396
In this elegant book, modernism is illuminated through little-known but striking works by Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and others who revived the “closet drama” - plays written largely for private reading - as a means of exploring forbidden sexualities.
The Prison and the American Imagination
Caleb Smith
Yale University Press | September 2009
ISBN: 978-0300141665
How did a nation so famously associated with freedom become internationally identified with imprisonment? After the scandals of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and in the midst of a dramatically escalating prison population, the question is particularly urgent. In this timely, provocative study, Caleb Smith argues that the dehumanization inherent in captivity has always been at the heart of American civil society.
More info from YUP
Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are
Paul Fry
Yale University Press | June 2008
ISBN: 978-0300126488
In this original book, distinguished literary scholar and critic Paul H. Fry sharply revises accepted views of Wordsworth’s motives and messages as a poet. Where others have oriented Wordsworth toward ideas of transcendence, nature worship, or—more recently—political repression, Fry redirects the poems and offers a strikingly revisionary reading.
More info from YUP