By Claire Solomon.

The first comprehensive and interdisciplinary study of the prostitute in Latin American literature, Claire Thora Solomon’s book The Naturalist Prostitute and Her Avatars in Latin American Literature, 1880–2010 shows the gender, ethnic, and racial identities that emerge in the literary figure of the prostitute during the consolidation of modern Latin American states in the late nineteenth century in the literary genre of Naturalism. Solomon first examines how legal, medical, and philosophical thought converged in Naturalist literature of prostitution. She then traces the persistence of these styles, themes, and stereotypes about women, sex, ethnicity, and race in the twentieth and twenty-first century literature with a particular emphasis on the historical fiction of prostitution and its selective reconstruction of the past.

Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2014. 223p.

Edited By Marlene Tromp Maria K. Bachman Heidi Kaufman.

In this groundbreaking collection, scholars explore Victorian xenophobia as a rhetorical strategy that transforms “foreign” people, bodies, and objects into perceived invaders with the dangerous power to alter the social fabric of the nation and the identity of the English. Essays in the collected edition look across the cultural landscape of the nineteenth century to trace the myriad tensions that gave rise to fear and loathing of immigrants, aliens, and ethnic/racial/religious others. This volume introduces new ways of reading the fear and loathing of all that was foreign in nineteenth-century British culture, and, in doing so, it captures nuances that often fall beyond the scope of current theoretical models. “Xenophobia” not only offers a distinctive theoretical lens through which to read the nineteenth century; it also advances and enriches our understanding of other critical approaches to the study of difference. Bringing together scholarship from art history, history, literary studies, cultural studies, women’s studies, Jewish studies, and postcolonial studies, Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia seeks to open a rich and provocative dialogue on the global dimensions of xenophobia during the nineteenth century.

Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013. 390.

By Sharon Stockton.

In The Economics of Fantasy: Rape in Twentieth-Century Literature, Sharon Stockton examines the persistence and the evolution of the rape narrative in twentieth-century literature—the old story of male power and violence; female passivity and penetrability. What accounts for its persistence? How has the story changed over the course of the twentieth century? In this provocative book, Stockton investigates the manner in which the female body—or to be more precise, the violation of the female body—serves as a metaphor for a complex synthesis of masculinity and political economy. From high modernism to cyberpunk, Pound to Pynchon, Stockton argues that the compulsive return to the rape story, articulates—among other things—the gradual and relentless removal of Western man from the fantastical capitalist role of venturesome, industrious agency. The metamorphosis of the twentieth-century rape narrative registers a desperate attempt to preserve traditional patterns of robust, entrepreneurial masculinity in the face of economic forms that increasingly disallow illusions of individual authority. It is important to make clear that the genre of rape story studied here presumes a white masculine subject and a white feminine object. Stockton makes the case that the aestheticized rape narrative reveals particular things about the way white masculinity represents itself. Plotting violent sexual fantasy on the grid of economic concerns locates masculine agency in relation to an explicitly contingent material system of power, value, and order. It is in this way that The Economics of Fantasy discloses the increased desperation with which the body has been made to carry ideology under systems of advanced capitalism.

Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2006. 235p.

By Andrew Mangham.

“Bodies are very unstable things in Dickens. In addition to the various characters with parts that are missing or defunct, like Wackford Squeers, Silas Wegg, Mr Smallweed, Mrs Skewton, Captain Cuttle, and Mrs Clennam, we find bodies that are taken apart (like the mangled remains of Mr Carker and Rigauld) and (re)assembled (like Mrs Jarley’s waxworks or Mr Venus’s French Gentleman). We encounter living bodies without souls, like the prisoners in “A Visit to Newgate” (1836) and American Notes (1842), and souls like Little Nell and Oliver Twist whose bodies seem barely capable of holding them in. More gruesomely, Dickensian bodies have a tendency to turn into slime and ash, such as when Miss Havisham is burned in Great Expectations (1860–61), or when the inhabitants of a city churchyard threaten to sully the appropriated dress of Lady Dedlock.”

Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2016. 272p.

By Dante Alighieri.

Written in the early 14th century, The Divine Comedy, in three books, Hell, Purgatory and Paradise are among the greatest creative writings of the world. Dante was the first, and possibly the only scholar to develop a systematic theory of punishment, based, of course (yes, of course) on the Christian religion, particularly that of Roman Catholicism. It is no accident that the first book is that of Hell, followed by Purgatory, and finally (and anticlimactic) Paradise. Of course, the poetry is divine. Trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

NY. Harrow and Heston Classic Reprint. 1321. 419p.

By Samuel Butler.

Or Over The Range. This is a classic pioneering science fiction story written in 1872. A strange story where crime is treated as a sickness, and sickness as a crime.

Harrow and Heston Classic Reprint. 1901. 140p.

By Charles Dickens.

Dickens traveled to America in 1842 and wrote letters home to his friend John Forster. These were published in a book in the same year. It was not received well because of his criticism of American manners, slavery, and the American press.

Harrow and Heston Classic Reprint. (1842) 240 pages.

By Christopher P. Wilson.

Since the mid-1960s, the war on crime has reshaped public attitudes about state authority, criminal behavior, and the responsibilities of citizenship. But how have American writers grappled with these changes? What happens when a journalist approaches the workings of organized crime not through its legendary Godfathers but through a workaday, low-level figure who informs on his mob? Why is it that interrogation scenes have become so central to prime-time police dramas of late? What is behind writers’ recent fascination with “cold case” homicides, with private security, or with prisons? In Learning to Live with Crime, Christopher P. Wilson examines this war on crime and how it has made its way into cultural representation and public consciousness. Under the sway of neoconservative approaches to criminal justice and public safety, Americans have been urged to see crime as an inevitable risk of modern living and to accept ever more aggressive approaches to policing, private security, and punishment. The idea has been not simply to fight crime but to manage its risks; to inculcate personal vigilance in citizens; and to incorporate criminals’ knowledge through informants and intelligence gathering. At its most scandalous, this study suggests, contemporary law enforcement has even come to mimic crime’s own operations.

Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2010. 302p.

By Régine Michelle Jean-Charles.

This book explores the relationship between rape and narratives of violence in francophone literature and culture. The book offers ways to account for the raped bodies beneath the conflicts of slavery, genocide, dictatorship, natural disasters and war—and to examine why doing so is necessary. Through a feminist analysis of the rhetoric and representation of rape in francophone African and Caribbean cultural production, Conflict Bodies examines theoretical, visual, and literary texts that challenge the dominant views of postcolonial violence. Using an interdisciplinary and comparative framework to consider different contexts—Haiti, Guadeloupe, Rwanda, and Democratic Republic of the Congo—Régine Michelle Jean-Charles illuminates how analyzing survivors’ subjectivities, stories, and embodied experiences provides a nuanced understanding of what is at stake in rape representation. Referencing theories from francophone literary studies, transnational black feminisms, and rape cultural criticism to analyze novels, film, photography, drama, and documentaries, Jean-Charles argues that in today’s global climate—where one in three women worldwide has been raped, rape is being used as a tool of war, and rape myths circulate with vehemence—traditional “scripts of violence” that fail to account for sexual violence demand refusal, re-thinking, and re-imagining.

Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2014. 335p.