Dust Jacket Research Articles

Orhan Pamuk Literature in Japanese

This article gives an account of the paratexts of the Orhan Pamuk translations into Japanese between “2004-2024” and is based on my “descriptive and product-oriented” paratextual research on the Japanese translations of Pamuk literature (Oğuz Baykara, Orhan Pamuk Japoncada, Forum Tauri Press, İstanbul). This study has four basic aims: The first aim is to identify the paratexts of Pamuk Literature in Japanese and create a corpus. The second aim is to obtain empirical data from the Japanese paratexts inside the Orhan Pamuk translations (peritexts: such as the book cover, dust jacket, bands, introduction, preface, epilogue, etc.) and some paratexts outside the book (epitexts: such as translation-related articles, translation criticisms, promotional texts, etc.) and translate them into Turkish. The third aim is to present the translated empirical data to the readers in the form of texts, diagrams, tables, and statistical figures. The fourth and final aim is to determine the position of Orhan Pamuk Literature in the “Turkish Japanese Translation History” in the last 100 years and evaluate its contributions to the global visibility of Turkish Literature in the Japanese context.

The Rediscovered 20th Century Boy Scout Dust Jacket Artwork of New Jersey Pulp Artist Chris Schaare

Christian Richard “Dick” Schaare Jr. (pronounced Shar) was arguably New Jersey’s most prolific and perhaps greatest pulp artist of the 20th century. His iconic artwork would grace hundreds of book covers, dust jackets, comic books, magazines, cigar boxes, calendars, milk cartons, and advertisements for more than 40 years from the 1920s to the 1960s. His pulp fiction artwork is well-known except for 18 dust jackets commissioned by the A. L. Burt Company for their Boy Scout fiction series books published in the mid to late 1920s. That he illustrated these dust jackets, brimming with action, adventure, and drama, has been largely forgotten by time, but they highlight his iconic pulp fiction style early in his career. 

Trumpets and Other High Brass: A History Inspired by the Joe R. and Joella F. Utley Collection. Volume 4: Heyday of the Cornet by Sabine Katharina Klaus (review)

Reviewed by: Trumpets and Other High Brass: A History Inspired by the Joe R. and Joella F. Utley Collection. Volume 4: Heyday of the Cornet by Sabine Katharina Klaus Bryan Proksch Trumpets and Other High Brass: A History Inspired by the Joe R. and Joella F. Utley Collection. Volume 4: Heyday of the Cornet. By Sabine Katharina Klaus. Vermillion, SD: National Music Museum, 2022. [xv, 336 p. ISBN 9780984826971 (hardcover), $119.95.] Illustrations, bibliography, index, accompanying DVD. In this fourth installment of a planned five-volume set, Sabine Klaus once again dives headfirst into the brass instruments collected by the late Joe and Joella Utley, now held by the National Music Museum (NMM) in Vermillion, South Dakota. Once completed, the set will present the most comprehensive view—both historical and in photographic documentation—of "trumpets and high brass" ever written. Volume 4, perhaps the set's most specific in scope, examines some 150 cornets constructed from the 1840s into the 1990s, with a noticeable weighting for instruments made from about 1880 to 1920. Klaus studies a remarkably broad range of manufacturers, both large and small, making cornets in literally every shape and size imaginable (and some unimaginable) from all the major centers of construction in the United States and Europe, as well as Japan. The book is a remarkable achievement and will surely serve as a benchmark study and baseline reference work for decades to come. Although no book can be all things to all people, Klaus must be commended for making a strong effort toward that end. Scholars—especially organologists and musicologists—will find a compilation of details on manufacturers, countless patent drawings, line drawings of valve arrangements, discussions of construction techniques, raw measurements, waveforms, X-rays, and dates and places for specific makes and models. All are useful for both general knowledge and specific study. Meticulous and numerous footnotes allow those interested in pursuing more detailed research to do so with ease. Performers, especially the modern trumpeter, will discover historical photographs of the actual instruments played by their famous predecessors, with at least passing reference to a few not owned by the NMM. Highlights include J.-B. Arban's cornets (two, both at the Musée de la musique in Paris), Walter Emerson's 1881 Courtois cornet, P. S. Gilmore's unique "Antoniophones," and the odd slide cornet–trumpet hybrid played by Louis Armstrong from his famous photo session with King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band. For the lay reader—including collectors of instruments and ephemera—the book's lavish full-color illustrations, provided at a generous average of about three per page, will provide hours of armchair browsing interspersed with enjoyable skimming. The photos of the NMM's instruments are a treat unto themselves, but advertisements, ephemera, and other historical documents make this book far more than a simple parade of cornets. Even the most focused reader will [End Page 616] find it difficult to keep to Klaus's prose without getting distracted by the figures. The elaborate dedications and engravings on many of the Utley cornets—consistently featured with a detail photo as well as an in-text transcription and interpretation—are particularly enticing, given the way they offer peeks into artisan techniques, artistry, and historical details. Two jewel-encrusted Besson cornets used for exposition displays in the 1880s (NMM 7119 and 7120) are the visual highlight of the whole book and are featured on the dust jacket. When it comes to various issues in cornet history, Klaus consistently delivers thorough explanations using straightforward and accessible language. Her comparison of Périnet and Stölzel valves in chapter 1 presents the pros and cons of each, including scientific measurements alongside clear line drawings and photographs of instruments. On "high pitch" and "low pitch" cornets (pp. 76 and 77), she concisely explains the situations in both Europe and the United States as related to each instrument and practice. Cornet history is littered with instruments named after performers but outwardly similar in construction to the untrained eye. Those interested in knowing the difference between Courtois's "Arban," "Arbuckle," "Levy," and "Arbuckle/Emerson" models will find answers in terms of construction, decoration, and marketing. The same holds true for...

Ryan S. Schellenberg. Abject Joy: Paul, Prison, and the Art of Making Do

Ryan S. Schellenberg. <i>Abject Joy: Paul, Prison, and the Art of Making Do</i>

Louis Menand. The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War.

Louis Menand’s The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War arrives with all the signifiers of a landmark. The product of nearly two decades of work by a prominent New Yorker critic and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, its dust jacket includes promises from assembled luminaries that it will be “dazzling,” “astonishing,” “coolly independent,” a “colossal achievement of imagination.” Encompassing 727 pages of text, not inclusive of notes, its chapters wind with smooth confidence across varied terrain: from literary studies (Trilling; Ransom; Derrida; de Man), to popular (the Beatles) and avant-garde (John Cage) music, to social and political theory (Sartre; Riesman; Arendt; Lévi-Strauss; Berlin; Fanon), to cultural criticism (Orwell; Baldwin; Sontag; Baraka; Kael), to the visual arts (Abstract Expressionism; commercial design; Pop Art; Godard). Readers will find a wealth of illuminating narrative details, braided together in an extraordinarily ambitious and finely wrought synthesis of the intellectual life of the age. The book has already achieved a broad audience and will be an essential office companion for lecturers on American cultural and intellectual history for decades to come.

Informacja o obcych autorach książek dziecięcych zamieszczona w przekładach na język polski i w przekierowaniach do Sieci

Information about the authors of translated books is placed by both traditional publishing houses and new companies. Some publications recommend websites and social media (Instagram, Facebook) as sources of further information about the author, which gives them a convergent character. On the basis of the book studies and analysis of information found in contemporary translations of works addressed to children and school youth (9-13 years old), the methods of providing information about the origin and achievements of foreign authors in books as decided upon by publishers (and authors themselves) have been shown: in the content of the book (introduction, ending, prologue, afterword) or in “external” places - on flaps, dust jackets and covers (in blurbs). The following aspects are characterised: the type of information (official, private), scope (about the author and/or the work, the writer’s output, previous works and future plans) as well as method and purpose of the message (informative, persuasive, humorous, marketing).

“Could you make it rather more of a He and She picture”: Queer Texts and Dust Jackets in Mid-Twentieth Century British Fiction

Previous articleNext article No Access“Could you make it rather more of a He and She picture”: Queer Texts and Dust Jackets in Mid-Twentieth Century British FictionChristopher AdamsChristopher Adams Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America Volume 116, Number 4December 2022 Published for the Bibliographical Society of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/722614 Views: 60Total views on this site © 2022 Bibliographical Society of America. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Warfare and Logistics along the US–Canadian Border during the War of 1812 by Christopher Dishman

Reviewed by: Warfare and Logistics along the US–Canadian Border during the War of 1812 by Christopher Dishman Don Hickey (bio) Keywords War of 1812, Canada, Maritime history Warfare and Logistics along the US–Canadian Border during the War of 1812. By Christopher Dishman. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2021. Pp. 352. Cloth, $39.95.) It is well-known that armies travel on their stomachs, but that doesn't mean that nations going to war are always prepared to adequately support their troops in the field. When the theaters of operation are numerous and remote, the problem of supply is magnified. In the War of 1812, there were arguably as many as ten theaters: Four in the Canadian–American borderlands (Lake Erie–Detroit River, Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence River, and the Richelieu River–Lake Champlain corridor); three on the Atlantic seaboard (Maine, the Chesapeake Bay, and the Georgia coast); another on the Gulf Coast (that included Pensacola, Mobile, and New Orleans); the St. Louis theater in the West; and, finally, the high seas. Although the British had to send men and materiel across the Atlantic, they had deep pockets and plenty of wartime experience and thus had a well-developed and well-financed system of supply. Even so, they had trouble supporting operations in the West, especially at Detroit and New Orleans. For the United States, the distances were more manageable, but without an established system of supply and the money to support it, their challenges were no less daunting. As a result, despite the successes of the British early in the war and of the Americans later on, the outcome on the battlefield was inconclusive. In his new book, Christopher Dishman, an independent scholar who cut his teeth on the Battle of Monterrey in the Mexican War, examines the war along the Canadian–American border. Not unreasonably, Dishman treats the four theaters as an integrated whole. Although the title, preface, and dust jacket promise that this work will take a deep dive into the logistics of the war, he offers little more on that important and underserved subject than one finds in any study of the battles and campaigns. There is some material on logistics in the opening chapter, but that is far from complete and serves as little more than a teaser for what should have followed. This work is instead a conventional narrative. Dishman is a newcomer to the field of 1812 studies, and he brings to the project a fresh set of eyes. This is often a plus because the author is unencumbered by the traditional narrative. For 1812 studies, Alan Taylor's The [End Page 627] Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies (New York, 2010) is a good example of the freshness that a newcomer can bring to the table. The great strength of Dishman's work is that he offers readers a tight and coherent treatment of Canadian–American theaters in this conflict, and it was here, after all, that the war was going to be won or lost. Although the United States went to war to force the British to give up certain maritime practices—restricting and looting American trade under the authority of the Orders-in-Council and impressing American seamen from American merchant vessels—the only way the new nation could put any pressure on Britain to change these policies was by targeting Canada. In theory, this meant seizing Canada and holding it for ransom on the maritime issues, although in practice what the fate of Canada would have been had the United States actually conquered it is unknown. In any case, the young republic failed to take Canada, and in truth conquering it was probably beyond its means. If so, then this war was unwinnable and probably never should have been undertaken. Better, perhaps, to simply endure the insults and injuries until the end of the war in Europe eliminated them. The principal weakness of Dishman's work is that he is treading a well-worn path, and while he does a good job of drawing together material from a wide variety of sources, there isn't much here that most students of...

The (in)visibility of translation and translators in the Swedish publication of post-Soviet Russian literature

In this article the (in)visibility of translation and translators in Sweden is studied, based on the analysis of a corpus of 82 post-Soviet Russian novels. The aim is to investigate how (if at all) the peritexts reveal the foreign nature of the text and the identity of the translator. The analysis shows that the translator is rather invisible in the external peritext, which is placed on the cover or dust jacket of the published translation, while the foreign (and consequently also the translated) nature of the novel is highlighted. The translator’s visibility inside Swedish translations of post-Soviet nov­els is usually signaled on the title page. Apart from this, the translator is invisible. A few translator’s comments and notes are included in the translation, but usually these are inconspicuous and not explicitly attributed to the translator. Moreover, they are written in an apologetic tone and do not seem to wish to disturb the reader.

Latin Literature

There have been very many exciting books on Latin literature in the past six months; here is at least a small selection. J. N. Adams presents an impressive volume on asyndeton in Latin literature. Based on a thorough examination of different types of asyndeta, with a special focus on asyndeta bimembria (‘asyndeta with two members’), Adams discusses ‘grammatical’ and semantic types of asyndeta, as well as their characteristic structural patterns, followed by a discussion of genres and texts, from laws and prayers over asyndeta from texts of the early Republic to the Augustan period. For historiography, Tacitus’ Histories and Annals are included as well. In the course of his discussion, Adams debunks some long-held beliefs about Latin asyndeta, which, he shows, are not predominantly a feature of sacral or legal language, as has often been claimed. He also argues that asyndeton, rather than evoking speed or rapidity, may instead invite a reading that is slow and deliberate, with meaningful pauses between the individual words (that most famous Latin asyndeton, which is printed on the dust jacket and discussed on 77–8, veni, vidi, vici [‘I came, I saw, I conquered’], works very well as an example).

Scott McLaren, Pulpit, Press and Politics: Methodists and the Market for Books in Upper Canada

<i>Scott McLaren</i>, Pulpit, Press and Politics: Methodists and the Market for Books in Upper Canada

Through Thick and Thin

Through Thick and Thin

David Daiches on Middlemarch: 1963

Abstract The first of what is hoped will be an occasional series of Critical and Scholarly Reflections from the Past on George Eliot, Her Life and Work. Particularly appropriate given the 150th anniversary of the publication of Middlemarch, the first is an extract from David Daiches’s seventy-two-page monograph discussion of George Eliot: Middlemarch in the “Studies in English Literature” series of which he was the General Editor, published by Edward Arnold. According to the blurb on the inside dust jacket, “this series is designed to provide students of individual plays, novels and groups of poems and essays, which are known to be widely studied in Six Forms and in universities. The emphasis is on clarification and evaluation; biographical facts are subordinated to critical discussion.” The series appeared in the United States as “Barron’s Studies in English and Continental Literature.” The extract follows a brief exposition of Daiches’s career and significance.

Unpacking the MoMA Myth: Modernism under Revision

Unpacking the MoMA Myth: Modernism under Revision Sandra Zalman (bio) As reviewers evaluated the “new” Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on the occasion of the institution’s ninetieth anniversary in 2019, several critics invoked a common myth of the museum’s origins. The myth goes something like this: Alfred Barr, the museum’s founding director, was a mastermind who established a narrow canon of modern art while building MoMA’s collection. This myth has recently been echoed by several writers, but it was most eloquently articulated by New York Times art critic Holland Cotter:1 Early on, the Museum of Modern Art developed a snugly tailored origin myth for modern art itself. This was invented by the museum’s first director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., and mapped out in a began-and-begat chart of labels and directional arrows. The chart had the operational logic of a computer board, but was programmed for limited connectivity.2 Barr (who was indeed incautiously fond of diagrams) did have a vision—but it was not locked into a teleological genealogy, nor was it the “succession [of] dramas” that “has prevailed since the museum’s founding,” as critic Jerry Saltz writes. What these reductive characterizations leave out is that defining modernism was hardly a hard-wired affair, but a messy process that involved constant revision. While the chart has been rightly critiqued for its oversights and biases, this article aims instead to unpack what we could call the MoMA myth—that Barr’s famous 1936 chart of the development of abstract art advocates for a preordained streamlined, authoritarian modernism. In order to untangle the MoMA myth and the legacy of the chart, this article teases apart [End Page 283] MoMA’s earlier experimental years from its later reputation to consider why the chart has played such an outsized role in (mis)representing modernism. As a first step, it is time to stop reading Barr’s chart as mapping all of modern art, when it was meant—provisionally—to track the development of one stylistic trend among many others (fig. 1). As is well known, the chart appeared as the dust jacket of the 1936 exhibition catalog Cubism and Abstract Art and was reproduced as a poster within the exhibition. Yet Barr meant neither the exhibition, nor the chart, to be definitive. Throughout MoMA’s history, he refrained from attempting to define modern art. In 1931, Barr would only describe it as “a relative, elastic term that serves conveniently to designate painting, sculpture, architecture, and the lesser visual arts, original and progressive in character, produced especially within the last three decades but including also the ‘pioneer ancestors’ of the nineteenth century.”3 And upon his retirement, more than thirty years later, he maintained this notion, insisting that modern art “can’t be defined with any degree of finality.”4 Barr envisioned modern art as an expansive category that encompassed a vast cross-section of visual production especially, though not necessarily, of the twentieth century, nor circumscribed by any particular style. To conflate modernism with abstraction—as so many later readings of the chart have done—might be an appealing simplification of Barr’s position, but it is one that fundamentally misrepresents his conviction that abstraction was only one strand of a more complicated, variegated modernism.5 Even MoMA’s current director, Glenn Lowry, makes this critical mistake in his 2013 essay on the chart, where he writes that “Barr’s diagram . . . had a goal: to demonstrate that abstraction was the inevitable culmination of earlier movements in art, making it the primary means of modern expression.”6 Lowry might see inevitability in reading the chart top to bottom, but we should consider Barr’s concept of the chart—as an “exercise in recent archeology,” that is, starting with abstract works of the present moment and working backwards.7 Moreover, Barr never made any claims on the primacy of abstraction, nor conflated it with modernism. He clearly labeled the diagram “the development of abstract art”; elsewhere he referred to it as the “Cubism and Abstract Art chart,” and, significantly, not as a chart of modern art, as it is mislabeled in his collected writings.8 The slip...

Chinese Poets Since 1949 ed. by Christopher Lupke and Thomas Moran

Reviewed by: Chinese Poets Since 1949 ed. by Christopher Lupke and Thomas Moran Frederik Green Christopher Lupke and Thomas Moran, eds. Chinese Poets Since 1949. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 387. Detroit: Gale Cengage / Columbia, SC: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 2021. 461 p. Few reference works have accompanied me as reliably throughout my career—first as a student, then as a scholar and teacher—as Gale's Dictionary of Literary Biographies (DLB) series. With the publication in 2007 of Chinese Fiction Writers from 1900-1949 and in 2013 of Chinese Fiction Writers from 1950-2000, the DLB series finally paid tribute to the rich legacy of twentieth-century Chinese literature. These are still the most comprehensive and authoritative bibliographical reference works on modern Chinese-language novelists, and Editor Thomas E. Moran must have known that he had set the bar high for any subsequent volume dedicated to modern Chinese literature. With the publication of DLB # 387 Chinese Poets Since 1949, Co-editors Christopher Lupke and Thomas E. Moran have clearly risen to the challenge. Encompassing some forty-five poets who have all contributed in significant ways to the flowering of Chinese-language poetry in the second half of the twentieth- and the first two decades of the twenty-first centuries, [End Page 147] the tome under review impresses with its sheer breadth as well as its academic rigor. Clocking in at 461 pages, Chinese Poets Since 1949 is a behemoth that, at first sight, displays all the usual characteristics of the DLB series. Besides the elegantly written and thoroughly researched bibliographical essays by forty international scholars, it features a general introduction by the two co-editors, a comprehensive checklist of Further Readings, and a cumulative index to the entire DLB series. In addition to the conventional qualities of such a reference work, Chinese Poets Since 1949, upon closer inspection, reveals a host of unexpected treasures. Accompanied by a photograph of the poet discussed, each entry further includes reproductions of a wide variety of documents, ranging from select book covers and dust jackets to handwritten manuscripts, such as pages from poems by Aku Wuwu (11) or Ling Yu (92). The entry for poet-painter Yan Li reproduces a painting by the artist (229), while the one for Lü De'an includes a photo of the mountain dwelling that the poet painstakingly built himself and which, according to Paul Manfredi, is "a kind of sweeping analogy for Lü's writing process writ large" (99). The general introduction further replicates covers from key literary journals such as Lanxing Shikan (Blue Star Poetry Journal) and Jintian (Today). These documents, painstakingly assembled from various archives across the world or made available courtesy of the authors or contributors, thus provide valuable additional clues to understanding the production, dissemination, consumption, and reception of Chinese-language poetry since the mid-twentieth century. Most users will probably treat Chinese Poets Since 1949 as a reference work to be consulted when researching one or more modern Chinese-language poets, and it excels beautifully at this function. Each essay begins with a complete list of the featured author's Chinese-language poetry books, editions and translations in English, and other relevant publications and concludes with a reference section. Sometimes in collections that incorporate a large number of contributors, the quality of entries varies greatly, but not in this case. All forty-five essays are solidly researched, well written, and complete in their presentation of bibliographical information. This consistently high academic quality throughout is the result of the two co-editors' feat of assembling a veritable who's who in the field of English-language [End Page 148] scholarship on modern Chinese language poetry. Based at universities in the US, Europe, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Australia, all are established scholars (and in most cases translators) of modern Chinese poetry, and many have been instrumental in introducing one or more of the authors discussed to readers in the West. While each entry exhibits great academic rigor and attention to detail, the approach contributors have taken in presenting their respective poets' biographies varies somewhat. All include at least some examples of poetry in translation to complement the theoretical and socio-historical contextualization of the given...

The Rhetoric of Death and Discipleship in Premodern Japan: Sōchō's "Death of Sōgi" and "Kikaku's Death of Master Bashō." by H. Mack Horton

Reviewed by: The Rhetoric of Death and Discipleship in Premodern Japan: Sōchō's "Death of Sōgi" and "Kikaku's Death of Master Bashō." by H. Mack Horton Gary L. Ebersole The Rhetoric of Death and Discipleship in Premodern Japan: Sōchō's "Death of Sōgi" and "Kikaku's Death of Master Bashō." By H. Mack Horton. Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 2019. 142 pages. ISBN: 9781557291844 (hardcover; also available as softcover and e-book). In The Rhetoric of Death and Discipleship in Premodern Japan, H. Mack Horton offers his readers annotated translations of two modest texts—Sōgi shūenki (The Death of Sōgi; 1502), by Sōchō, and Bashō shūenki (The Death of Master Bashō; 1694), by Kikaku. Although these texts were composed almost two hundred years apart, Horton justifies bringing them together because they are both death accounts (shūenki) written by a disciple of a well-known master of linked verse. The texts are, he asserts, "among the most important death accounts in the premodern Japanese literary corpus" (p. xvi). Initially, Horton translates shūenki as "thanatographies" (p. xi). This may be an allusion to Harold Bolitho's coinage "thanatologues" in Bereavement and Consolation, but whatever the case Horton thankfully abandons this awkward neologism thereafter for the perfectly serviceable term "death accounts."1 According to Horton, accounts of the death of a well-known poet increased in number in the early modern period. Regrettably, he declines to investigate why this should have been the case: "The trajectory of the development of death accounts is complex and imbricated into the variegated history of death writing in its various Chinese and Japanese forms, a subject that would require a separate volume to detail. Suffice it here to say that The Death of Sōgi was an important precursor to the many accounts of the deaths of linked-verse poets that subsequently appeared during the Edo period" (p. 21). I must demur. The simplistic intertextual history proffered here—text X preceded and influenced the form of text Y—does not suffice as a historical explanation of either change or continuity. Horton is clearly capable of more and, I believe, he owes his readers more. After all, when he published an annotated [End Page 322] translation of Sōchō's journal in 2002, he simultaneously issued a separate volume that provided historical context for the poet's life and his journal more broadly.2 My dissatisfaction with this study does not seem to be widely shared, however, at least if the dust jacket comments of three reviewers are indicative of the state of the field of Japanese literary studies. Midorikawa Machiko clearly finds Horton's study to be more than sufficient, calling it "a model of what an annotated translation should be." For his part, Steven D. Carter lauds this work not only as a "masterful study, well researched and elegantly written," but also as one that provides "original answers to two important questions: how disciples of a dying master respond to his death in their own relationships and practices and how they represent loss and recovery in their own writing." Laurel Rasplica Rodd, too, praises the author's "meticulous scholarship and elegant translation." I do not question Horton's abilities as a translator. His renderings are accurate, and his copious annotations are based on an in-depth knowledge of the Japanese secondary scholarship. Whether his translations are "elegant" or not, however, is a matter of aesthetic and, thus, subjective appraisal. Suffice it to say that translating poetry is much trickier than translating prose. I have two intertwining reservations concerning this study: First, is this model of annotated translation sufficient as scholarship in the twenty-first century? Second, is the author's sociohistorical contextualization of these texts adequate and accurate? The book's structure seems to indicate that Horton has checked each box in the list of requirements for a "masterful" work in the academic genre of an annotated translation of a Japanese literary work. Horton's study in toto consists of 166 numbered pages, 24 of which are occupied by front matter. The translations of the two primary texts occupy only...

A Delicate Aggression: Savagery and Survival in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop by David O. Dowling.

<i>A Delicate Aggression: Savagery and Survival in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop</i> by David O. Dowling.

Dalrymple, William. The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire.

Dalrymple, William. <i>The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire</i>.

New Editions of The Great Gatsby

<i>New Editions of</i> The Great Gatsby

What’s Wrong with Rights. By Nigel Biggar

This volume is a cleverly titled, briskly paced, and hard-hitting study of the history, concept, and limits of rights and rights talk in the Western tradition and beyond. Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Christ Church, Oxford, brings a powerful analytical mind to the task, and a pair of sharp elbows, too, as he wades into the crowded interdisciplinary field of human rights study. Biggar’s sceptical attack on many forms and forums of historical and modern rights has won dust jacket raves and reviews from several fellow Christian scholars. But the book has also raised the hackles of several jurists and others who bristle at the author’s defence of torture and warfare, his disdain for judicial activism, and his sometimes blistering rebuke of national and international human rights instruments, tribunals, cases, judges, and legal counsel. I come to this book as a legal historian and find it learned and provocative, but also limited and flawed at critical points.