A general issue of Textual Practice with the usual combination of scholarly discourse and reviews. This book should be of interest to academics and students of literature, literary criticism, media studies and philosophy.

In Extremis is hte first major biography of a major 20th century modernist.

"Verse is born free but everywhere in chains. It has been my project to rattle the chains." (from "The Revenge of the Poet-Critic") In My Way, (in)famous language poet and critic Charles Bernstein deploys a wide variety of interlinked forms—speeches and poems, interviews and essays—to explore the place of poetry in American culture and in the university. Sometimes comic, sometimes dark, Bernstein's writing is irreverent but always relevant, "not structurally challenged, but structurally challenging." Addressing many interrelated issues, Bernstein moves from the role of the public intellectual to the poetics of scholarly prose, from vernacular modernism to idiosyncratic postmodernism, from identity politics to the resurgence of the aesthetic, from cultural studies to poetry as a performance art, from the small press movement to the Web. Along the way he provides "close listening" to such poets as Charles Reznikoff, Laura Riding, Susan Howe, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, and Gertrude Stein, as well as a fresh perspective on L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the magazine he coedited that became a fulcrum for a new wave of North American writing. In his passionate defense of an activist, innovative poetry, Bernstein never departs from the culturally engaged, linguistically complex, yet often very funny writing that has characterized his unique approach to poetry for over twenty years. Offering some of his most daring work yet—essays in poetic lines, prose with poetic motifs, interviews miming speech, speeches veering into song—Charles Bernstein's My Way illuminates the newest developments in contemporary poetry with its own contributions to them. "The result of [Bernstein's] provocative groping is more stimulating than many books of either poetry or criticism have been in recent years."—Molly McQuade, Washington Post Book World "This book, for all of its centrifugal activity, is a singular yet globally relevant perspective on the literary arts and their institutions, offered in good faith, yet cranky and poignant enough to not be easily ignored."—Publishers Weekly "Bernstein has emerged as postmodern poetry's sous-chef of insouciance. My Way is another of his rich concoctions, fortified with intellect and seasoned with laughter."—Timothy Gray, American Literature

An introduction to and advice on book collecting with a glossary of terms and tips on how to identify first editions and estimated values for over 20,000 collectible books published in English (including translations) over the last three centuries-about half are literary titles in the broadest sense (novels, poetry, plays, mysteries, science fiction, and children's books); and the other half are non-fiction (Americana, travel and exploration, finance, cookbooks, color plate, medicine, science, photography, Mormonism, sports, et al).

Laura Riding was a major poet whose poems, though widely admired and influential, have been little understood. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s she was 'a devout advocate of poetry' believing that 'to go to poetry is the most ambitious act of the mind'. Her subsequent renunciation of poetry in the 1940s gave rise to bemusement. Jack Blackmore tackles the causes of the neglect of Riding's poetry and establishes new and productive approaches to the poems. His close readings of fifteen poems demonstrate the progress of Collected Poems and the remarkable range and scope of her poetry. He establishes both the strength and unity of the poems and the continuity between them and her 'post-poetic' work, in particular her spiritual testament The Telling. Mark Jacobs's vivid memoir of a visit to the author in later life at her Florida home complements the work on the poems. "These essays are interesting and you have done well...You seem to me fair and just in what you say about her work.' - Robert Nye 'This is ambitious work, full of insights.' - Professor Michael Schmidtÿ

Modernism: An Anthology is the most comprehensive anthology of Anglo-American modernism ever to be published. Amply represents the giants of modernism - James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Samuel Beckett. Includes a generous selection of Continental texts, enabling readers to trace modernism’s dialogue with the Futurists, the Dadaists, the Surrealists, and the Frankfurt School. Supported by helpful annotations, and an extensive bibliography. Allows readers to encounter anew the extraordinary revolution in language that transformed the aesthetics of the modern world .

Existing only in manuscript since the 1940s but enjoying an underground reputation among friends and advocates, this primary document by one of the most original and influential of American poets and thinkers is now being published as Rational Meaning, Laura (Riding) Jackson's testament of the necessity of living for truth. Begun as a dictionary and thesaurus in the 1930s, the work developed into a fundamental reevaluation of language itself. Riding, in close collaboration with her husband, continued this monumental project over the succeeding decades, completing it after his death in 1968. At the core of Rational Meaning, which aims to restore the truth of language by arguing that meaning inheres in words, stands the idea that a total renovation of the knowledge of language is needed, not to develop mere verbal sophistication and respectability but fundamentally to reinvigorate the intellectual processes of consciousness. The book reveals the disastrous extent to which language has been "unlearned" and shows how it may be learned again. Rational Meaning will be essential reading, not only for students of literature but for radical-minded linguists and lexicographers unhappy with the orthodoxies current in their disciplines.

Thirteen original essays on Gertrude Stein, H. D., Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Elizabeth Bishop, Muriel Rukeyser, and Gwendolyn Brooks demonstrate how these women expand the social, textual, and political boundaries of modernism. The collection places these poets in the context of their times, examining the conditions that helped shape their vivid and diverse poetic careers and reconsidering some of the assumptions that have led to their exclusion from the main narratives of modernist poetry. Ultimately, the aim is to enlarge the literary history of the movement—for gendered, modernism extends backward to the first years of the century, and forward to the beginnings of postmodernism in the 1960s.

"Of the half-dozen key theoretical documents of Modernism written in English, this book, and Stein's How to Write, are surely the most brilliant. The originality of Anarchism's thought seems hardly less arresting today than it was when first published 70 years ago. We owe Samuels a great debt for restoring this book to our attention."—Jerome McGann, University of Virginia