San Antonio College Library

"Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies provides the first systemic and comprehensive account of the conventions governing soliloquies in Western drama from antiquity to the twentieth century. Avoiding anachronistic assumptions that have marred earlier commentaries on soliloquies, the present study is based on a painstaking analysis of the actual practices of dramatists from each age of theatrical history. This investigation has uncovered evidence...

"Woolley expands the story of the Chicago Renaissance to encompass women and African-American writers, including reformers Jane Addams and Ida B. Wells, magazine founders Harriet Monroe and Margaret Anderson, and Bronzeville poet Fenton Johnson, in addition of famous writers such as Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay. These authors probed the boundaries of language to convey simplicity, democracy, and Americanness - qualities that have come to be associated...

Throughout the nineteenth century, American fiction displayed a fascination with women's speech - describing how women's voices sound and what reactions their speech produces, especially in their male listeners. Closer inspection of these recurring descriptions reveals that they also performed political work that has had a profound - though until now unspecified - impact on American culture. Caroline Leyander illustrates how commentaries on the female...

"In ancient Athens, where freedom of speech derived from the power of male citizenship, women's voices were seldom heard in public. Female speech was more often represented in theatrical productions through women characters written and enacted by men. In Spoken Like a Woman, the first book-length study of women's speech in classical drama, Laura McClure explores the discursive practices attributed to women of fifth-century B.C. Greece and to what...

"Weird English explores experimental and unorthodox uses of English by multilingual writers traveling from the canonical works of Vladimir Nabokov and Maxine Hong Kingston to the less-critiqued linguistic terrain of Junot Diaz and Arundhati Roy. It examines the syntactic and grammatical innovations of these authors, who use English to convey their ambivalence toward or enthusiasm for English or their political motivations for altering its rules. Ch'ien...

Publisher description: What drove the ancient Greeks to explore human nature and invent Western politics? This book argues that the Greeks believed speech made humans different from other animals. But, this zoological comparison also provided the metaphorical means for viewing those 'lacking' authoritative speech--women, barbarians, and slaves, etc.--as bestial. This link between speech, humanity, and status is revealed through close study of both...