David E. Wellbery

From the earliest magical charms and mythical sagas to the brilliance and desolation of 20th-century fiction, poetry, and film, this illuminating reference book invites readers to experience the full range of German literary culture and to investigate for themselves its disparate and unifying themes.

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Gerald J. DeGroot

"Marc Shell's Polio and its Aftermath is something of a hybrid. It is part memoir, part cultural history, and part meditation on the meaning of disease, especially the cultural meaning of polio. There is nothing quite like this book in the extant literature on polio. Nothing with the sweep and range of Shell's book has been previously published."
‹Daniel J. Wilson, author of Living with Polio: The Epidemic and its Survivors

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In a book that explores the phenomenon of stuttering from its practical and physical aspects to its historical profile to its existential implications, Marc Shell plumbs the depths of this murky region between will and flesh, intention and expression, idea and world. This provocative and wide-ranging book shows that stuttering has implications for myriad types of expression and helps to define what it means to be human.

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Gerald J. DeGroot

"The 1960s, with the Civil Rights Movement, the advent of hippie culture, and the protests against the Vietnam War, has long garnered attention from scholars, writers, musical historians, and filmmakers alike. In the popular conception of pop culture, the 1950s are often labeled boring or drab by comparison. Preston Whaley's analysis, however, will go a long way toward identifying the cultural movements of the 1940s and 1950s as part of a linear whole, a direct predecessor fo the cultural revolution of the late 1960s."
‹Douglas Brinkley, author of World War II: The Axis Assault, 1939-1942

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Lawrence Buell

"I learned from and greatly enjoyed reading Lawrence Buell's Emerson."
‹Susan Sontag, Times Literary Supplement

"Lawrence Buell has written a comprehensive, penetrating and timely study, the distillation of a lifetime's scholarship, of this great thinker and writer, 'the poet of ordinary days,' as his disciple, John Dewey, beautifully called him."
‹John Banville, Irish Times

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Helen Vendler

Poetry has often been considered an irrational genre, more expressive than logical, more meditative than given to coherent argument. Yet Helen Vendler argues that, although they may prefer different means, all poets of any value are thinkers. The four poets taken up in this volume‹Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and William Butler Yeats‹come from three centuries and three nations, and their styles of thinking are characteristically ideosyncratic.

"Vendler's convincing and illuminating arguments make this book highly recommended."
‹Amy K. Weiss, Library Journal

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Stephen Toulmin

"There is now a 'loss of confidence'...in our traditional ideas about rationality, according to Toulmin. Especially among those in the humanities, he argues, the claims of rationality have been progressively challenged over the last 20 or 30 years, to the point of being sidelined. This is a common complaint and not exactly news, but Toulmin does not merely bemoan and rant, as many others have done. He offers a diagnosis and a solution."
‹Anthony Gottlieb, Los Angeles Times

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