NEW IN PAPER
The Clan of the Flapdragon and Other Adventures in Etymology by B. M. W. Schrapnel, Ph.D. Richard McKee
In The Clan of the Flapdragon and Other Adventures in Etymology by B. M. W. Schrapnel, Ph.D., the pseudonymous critic satirizes a variety of subjects in and out of academe. These adventurous essays include lampoons on writing, language, and literature, and the collection is a delightful spoof of much in contemporary culture—especially areas of intellectual pretension. Readers will be entertained by anachronistic allusions, improbable parodies, whimsical etymologies, tongue-in-cheek word play, and stunning purple prose—examples of just some of the liberties Schrapnel takes with the language. Dr. Schrapnel includes a wide array of audience reactions in the form of bogus letters from fictional readers, confirming that language and literature are everyone’s business. He also offers an annual list of words that writers and speakers should use more often—a lexicographer’s equivalent to the endangered species list—and coins terms such as prufrockery and grendelish.
DECEMBER 5.5 X 8.5 / 200 PAGES 978-0-8173-6009-2 / $24.95s PAPER 978-0-8173-9352-6 / $24.95 EBOOK
Richard McKee now lives in Venice, Florida, and is retired from the State College of Florida. His satire and creative non-fiction have won awards from the Florida Freelance Writers Association and the south Florida chapter of the National Writers Club.
Through the Window, Out the Door Women’s Narratives of Departure, from Austin and Cather to Tyler, Morrison, and Didion Janis P. Stout An important moment in many novels and poems by American women writers occurs when a central character looks out a window or walks out the door of a house. These acts of departure serve to convey such values as the rejection of constraining social patterns, the search for individual fulfillment, and the entry into the political. Janis P. Stout examines such moments and related patterns of venture and travel in the fiction of five major American novelists of the twentiethcentury: Mary Austin, Willa Cather, Anne Tyler, Toni Morrison, and Joan Didion. Stout views these five writers within a spectrum of narrative engagements with issues of home and departure anchored at one end by Sarah Orne Jewett and at the other by Marilynne Robinson, whose Housekeeping posits a vision of female transience.
NOVEMBER 6 X 9 / 304 PAGES 1 B&W FIGURE 978-0-8173-6012-2 / $34.95s PAPER 978-0-8173-9355-7 / $34.95 EBOOK
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Through the Window, Out the Door ranges an expansive territory. Moving between texts and contexts, Stout shows how women writers have envisioned the walls of both physical and social structures (including genres) as permeable boundaries, drawing on both a rhetoric of liberation and a rhetoric of domesticity to construct narrative arguments for women’s right to move freely between the two. Janis P. Stout is professor of English emerita at Texas A&M University. Her publications include Cather Among the Moderns and South by Southwest: Katherine Anne Porter and the Burden of Texas History.
