"There is something about the very form and occasion of a letter-the possibility it offers, the chance to be as open and tentative and uncertain as one likes and also the chance to formulate certain ideas, very precisely-if one is lucky in one's thoughts," wrote James Wright, one of the great lyric poets of the last century, in a letter. A Wild Perfection is a riveting collection that captures the exhilarating and moving correspondence between Wright and his many friends. In the letters to fellow poets Donald Hall, Theodore Roethke, Galway Kinnell, James Dickey, Mary Oliver, and Robert Bly, Wright explored many subjects, poetic and personal, from his creative process to his struggles with depression and illness. Bright threads of wit, gallantry, and passion for describing his travels and his beloved natural world run through all these letters, which together form an epistolary chronicle of a significant part of the mid-century American poetry renaissance, as well as the clearest biographical picture now available of this major American poet.

Transcending arguments over the definition of fantasy literature, Rhetorics of Fantasy introduces a provocative new system of classification for the genre. Utilizing nearly two hundred examples of modern fantasy, author Farah Mendlesohn uses this system to explore how fiction writers construct their fantastic worlds. Mendlesohn posits four categories of fantasy-portal-quest, immersive, intrusion, and liminal-that arise out of the relationship of the protagonist to the fantasy world. Using these sets, Mendlesohn argues that the author's stylistic decisions are then shaped by the inescapably political demands of the category in which they choose to write. Each chapter covers at least twenty books in detail, ranging from nineteenth-century fantasy and horror to extensive coverage of some of the best books in the contemporary field. Offering a wide-ranging discussion and penetrating comparative analysis, Rhetorics of Fantasy will excite fans and provide a wealth of material for scholarly and classroom discussion.Includes discussion of works by over 100 authors, including Lloyd Alexander, Peter Beagle, Marion Zimmer Bradley, John Crowley, Stephen R. Donaldson, Stephen King, C. S. Lewis, Gregory Maguire, Robin McKinley, China Miéville, Suniti Namjoshi, Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Sheri S. Tepper, J. R. R. Tolkien, Tad Williams

Working with a varied and untraditional cast of characters-Wyatt Earp, Jack London, Clara Bow, Gertrude Stein, and Ida Lupino-author Marsha Orgeron examines the Hollywood ambitions of a fading western legend, a successful popular author, a poor Brooklyn girl turned flapper icon, a self-proclaimed avant-garde genius, and a frustrated actress on her way to becoming a director. Investigating their separate involvements with the expanding film industry, Orgeron illustrates the implications of film celebrity during the era in which cinema's impact was first felt. The aspirations of these individuals demonstrate the unifying role that the American motion picture capital played in shaping cultural notions of reputation, success, glamour, and visibility. Through extensive and unprecedented primary research and illuminating analyses of films, texts, and personal writings, each chapter provides new insight into its subject's dealings in the mythic city. Hollywood Ambitions affords a unique understanding of the tremendous diversity of the Hollywood experience and its allure in the first half of the cinematic century.

A cigar-chomping storyteller who signaled "Action!" by shooting a gun, Samuel Fuller has been lionized as one of the most distinctive writer/directors ever to emerge from Hollywood. In such films as The Steel Helmet, Pickup on South Street, Shock Corridor, and The Big Red One, Fuller gleefully challenged classical and generic norms-and often standards of good taste-in an effort to shock and arouse audiences. Tackling war, crime, race, and sexuality with a candor rare for any period, Fuller's maverick vision was tested by Hollywood's transition from the studio system to independent filmmaking. Now, in the first full account of all of the director's audaciously original work, author Lisa Dombrowski brings his career into new relief. The Films of Samuel Fuller features close analysis of Fuller's pictures and draws on previously untapped production and regulatory files, script notes, and interviews to explore how artistic, economic, and industrial factors impacted Fuller's career choices and shaped the expression of his personal aesthetic. Fans of Fuller and American cinema will welcome this in-depth study of a provocative director who embodied both the unique opportunities and challenges of postwar filmmaking.

Peter Gizzi's powerful new collection fuses documentary truth with imaginative force. The Outernationale locates us "just off the grid," in an emotional and spiritual frontier, where reverie, outrage, history, and vision merge. Thinking and feeling become one in the urgent music of Gizzi's poems. Saturated with luminous detail, these original poems possess, even in their sorrowing moments, a dizzying freedom. This is both a poetry of conscience and the embodiment of a genuinely poetic consciousness. Objects, images, and their histories are caught here in their half-life, their profoundly human after-life. Gizzi has written a brilliant follow-up to Some Values of Landscape and Weather, a book hailed by Robert Creeley as "a breakthrough book in every way: for reader, for writer, and for the art."

The poetic masterpiece of the great nineteenth-century writer Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil is one of the most frequently read and studied works in the French language. In this compelling new translation of Baudelaire's most famous collection, Keith Waldrop recasts the poet's original French alexandrines and other poetic arrangements into versets, a form that hovers between poetry and prose. Maintaining Baudelaire's complex view of sound and structure, Waldrop's translation mirrors the intricacy of the original without attempting to replicate its inimitable verse. The result is a powerful new re-imagining, one that is, almost paradoxically, closer to Baudelaire's own poetry than any previous English translation. Including the six poems banned from the first edition, this Flowers of Evil preserves the complexity, eloquence, and dark humor of its author. Brought here to new life, it is hypnotic, frank, and forceful.

Every year, on a weekend before Christmas, the small Caribbean island of Carriacou, Grenada, holds its annual Parang Festival, featuring concerts, performances of local quadrille dance, Hosannah band (a cappella singing) competitions, and the climactic string band competition. Born in the years leading up to Grenada's 1979 Socialist Revolution, the Parang Festival today offers a vehicle for Carriacouans to articulate and assert a progressive understanding of local cultural identity as well as a regional, pan-Caribbean belonging. Rebecca S. Miller examines the varying impact that factors such as cultural ambivalence, globalization, and technology have had on the performance of Carriacou's folk and traditional music and dance forms. Using historical sources and current ethnography, she illuminates the enduring significance of the Parang Festival to illustrate the social and political history of Carriacou as well as this culture's contemporary process of modernization. The book includes a web link allowing the reader to listen to a variety of musical examples.

Rachel Zucker's third book of poems is a darkly comic collection that looks unsparingly at the difficulties and compromises of married life. Formally innovative and blazingly direct, The Bad Wife Handbook cross-examines marriage, motherhood, monogamy, and writing itself. Rachel Zucker's upending of grammatical and syntactic expectations lends these poems an urgent richness and aesthetic complexity that mirrors the puzzles of real life. Candid, subversive, and genuinely moving, The Bad Wife Handbook is an important portrait of contemporary marriage and the writing life, of emotional connection and disconnection, of togetherness and aloneness.

Early Connecticut Silver is a catalog of the most significant pieces of silver hollowware made by Connecticut silversmiths between the years 1700 and 1840, as well as representative flatware and other pieces such as swords and Masonic jewels. In all, it constitutes an exhibit that could never be mounted in a single museum, and one that proves the authors' conviction that Connecticut silver is distinctive and worthy of comparison to the more sophisticated contemporary styles associated with the silversmiths of Boston and New York City. Wesleyan is proud to offer a new edition of this essential work, featuring an introduction by Erin Eisenbarth that brings the coverage up to date, incorporating the research done on this subject since the original publication. The book still includes an introductory essay that defines "the Connecticut school," and an annotated index of silversmiths known to have worked in Connecticut and an index of the marks used by them.

Director of such often-revived films as Winchester '73, The Glenn Miller Story, and El Cid, Anthony Mann enjoyed a lasting and important career as one of Hollywood's premier filmmakers. Mann's Westerns, noir pictures, and epics are admired and studied by fans and scholars alike, and he was an expert in the fundamental elements of cinema (movement and placement of the camera, composition in the frame, and careful editing). Jeanine Basinger's Anthony Mann, which places the director's visual style at the center of its analysis, was among the first formal studies of any filmmaker, and it set a standard in the field over twenty-five years ago. Long out of print and much in demand, this pioneering book is now available again, featuring complete coverage of those Mann films not discussed in the original work, as well as over fifty rare film stills. Wesleyan is proud to issue this expanded edition of an essential text, making it available to new generations of filmgoers and readers.

In the late 1950s to 1970s, an Afro-Peruvian revival brought the forgotten music and dances of Peru's African musical heritage to Lima's theatrical stages. The revival conjured newly imagined links to the past in order to celebrate-and to some extent recreate-Black culture in Peru. In this groundbreaking study of the Afro-Peruvian revival and its aftermath, Heidi Carolyn Feldman reveals how Afro-Peruvian artists remapped blackness from the perspective of the "Black Pacific," a marginalized group of African diasporic communities along Latin America's Pacific coast. Feldman's "ethnography of remembering" traces the memory projects of charismatic Afro-Peruvian revival artists and companies, including José Durand, Nicomedes and Victoria Santa Cruz, and Perú Negro, culminating with Susana Baca's entry onto the global world music stage in the 1990s. Readers will learn how Afro-Peruvian music and dance genres, although recreated in the revival to symbolize the ancient and forgotten past, express competing modern beliefs regarding what constitutes "Black Rhythms of Peru."

Born in Switzerland, Jacob Weidenmann emigrated to the United States in 1856 at the age of twenty-seven after obtaining college-level diplomas in art, architecture, and engineering. The only landscape architect in America so educated, Weidenmann quickly gained a reputation for his excellent design and brilliant solutions to complex engineering and architectural challenges. He developed an important collaboration with Frederick Law Olmsted and became a leading innovator in the field, helping to set standards and design principles for the profession. Based on four decades of research by author Rudy J. Favretti, this is the first comprehensive biography of this major artist, covering his life and career in-depth, and illuminating Weidenmann's importance in defining his profession for future practitioners. Featuring over fifty illustrations, this oversized volume places Jacob Weidenmann in the context of his time, place, and art, and locates him in the pantheon of nineteenth-century designers.

A group of ritual musicians and former slaves brought from sub-Saharan Africa to Morocco, the Gnawa heal those they believe to be possessed, using incense, music, and trance. But their practice is hardly of only local interest: the Gnawa have long participated in the world music market through collaborations with African-American jazz musicians and French recording artists. In this first book in English on Gnawa music and its global reach, author Deborah Kapchan explores how these collaborations transfigure racial and musical identities on both sides of the Atlantic. She also addresses how aesthetic styles associated with the sacred come to inhabit non-sacred contexts, and what new amalgams they produce. Her narrative details the fascinating intrinsic properties of trance, including details of enactment, the role of gesture and the body, and the use of the senses, and how they both construct authentic Gnawa identity and reconstruct historically determined relations of power. Traveling Spirit Masters is a captivating and elucidating demonstration of how and why trance-and indeed all sacred music-is fast becoming a transnational sensation.

Founded in 1831, Wesleyan University's campus in Middletown, Connecticut, is rich in architecture and history. This attractive collection of photographs of campus buildings begins with the original buildings of College Row, and like a walking tour, takes the reader past a variety of more recent additions. Focusing on what would interest both alumni and university visitors, author Leslie Starr has included academic, athletic, administrative, and arts buildings, as well as residence halls, fraternity houses, and the off-campus deli. In-depth, informative captions detail each building's history and transitions over the years, and describe the buildings' occupants and namesakes. A campus map shows the location of each building. The book contains over fifty full-color photographs, including a recent aerial view, and an informative introduction describing the university's history. This attractively priced volume will appeal to anyone connected to or interested in Wesleyan University.

An expert writer and thinker on movie history and directorial style, Kent Jones is among the most notable film critics of his generation. His sharp, informed analyses and cogent assessments of cinema and its practitioners have made him a significant voice both in America and internationally. Jones' inaugural collection brings together the best of his reviews (on films including In the Mood for Love, A History of Violence, and The New World), evaluations of specific filmmakers (Wes Anderson, John Cassavetes, and the Coen brothers), polemics (on summer blockbusters, digital cinema, and Hollywood politics), and appreciations of other film critics. Several of these pieces are published here in English for the first time, having previously appeared only in the French journals Cahiers du Cinéma and Trafic. Physical Evidence is a penetrating and personal examination of contemporary and classic cinema, one that values nothing so much as seeing on the screen the proof-the physical evidence-of the filmmaker's own personal quest.

One of the most famous dancers of the early 1900s, Loïe Fuller created an extraordinary sensation in Paris with her manipulations of hundreds of yards of silk, swirling high above her and lit dramatically from below. Her work inspired artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Auguste Rodin, and Stéphane Mallarmé, and she embodied many of the decorative themes of Art Nouveau. Because her work highlights important issues in dance such as the role of technology in defining a dancing signature, the emergence of a modern movement sensibility, and the role of popular entertainment in early modern dance, Fuller is a critical figure through whom to study the changing representations of women dancers in the early twentieth century. Author Ann Cooper Albright places Fuller in the context of fin-de-siècle culture and offers a compelling analysis of Fuller's innovations in lighting and movement that includes full-color reproductions of original posters, archival photos, and magazine and newspaper clippings. Traces of Light adds significantly to the literature on twentieth-century dance, illuminating a pioneer who helped to shape modern performance and stagecraft. There is a digital web companion to this book at http://learningobjects.wesleyan.edu/wespress/traces/.