Brief Mention

Editions

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. By Olaudah Equiano. Ed. Angelo Costanzo. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press. 2001. 330 pp. Paper, $9.95.

Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography helped launch the slave narrative as a genre. Angelo Costanzo takes Equiano’s highly influential publication as the basis for this edition, including subsequent emendations to the text in appendices. Costanzo also offers readers sample writings from the first Western abolitionist movement, many of which Equiano himself knew, and provides updated biographical information on the Interesting Narrative’s author.

The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom. By William Wells Brown. Ed. John Ernest. Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press. 2001. li, 54 pp. Cloth, $25.00; paper, $12.50.

Half of this new edition of the first published play by an African American writer is devoted to a thorough introduction to the text. Published in 1858, the play makes use of the stock characters, melodramatic conventions, and traditional arguments of antislavery tracts, but as John Ernest maintains, the continuing value of the play lies in the complex picture of American culture under slavery that Brown presents.

Brothers ’til Death: The Civil War Letters of William, Thomas, and Maggie Jones, 1861–1865. Ed. Richard M. Trimble. Macon, Ga.: Mercer Univ. Press. 2000. xxiii, 173 pp. $35.00.

This collection of over one hundred letters written by two Irish brothers, their sister, and their friends during the U.S. Civil War delivers a unique immigrant perspective on the conflict.

“My Heart Is a Large Kingdom”: Selected Letters of Margaret Fuller. Ed. Robert N. Hudspeth. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press. 2001. xix, 336 pp. $29.95.

Robert Hudspeth selects a set of letters that represent Margaret Fuller’s thinking and relationships at all stages of her life, paring down his earlier six-volume collection of her correspondence. Unlike other collections, this volume only includes letters transcribed from Fuller’s manuscripts. Among the correspondents are Bronson Alcott, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emerson, and Thoreau.

Palace-Burner: The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt. Ed. Paula Bernat Bennett. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. 2001. lx, 195 pp. $29.95.

This collection of the work of nineteenth-century poet Sarah Piatt spans more than fifty years of her life. Some of these poems have never been collected, and all of the writer’s major themes—the Civil War, gender, motherhood, Ireland, religion, art, and political and moral allegories—are represented in this volume. Paula Bennett’s comprehensive introduction offers a brief biography and acquaints the reader with Piatt’s work.

Lectures on Shakespeare. By W. H. Auden. Ed. Arthur Kirsch. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press. 2000. xxiv, 398 pp. $29.95.

Auden delivered a set of lectures on Shakespeare in 1946, and Arthur Kirsch reconstructs Auden’s words and ideas from the notes of students who attended his course. Auden discusses the “Christian psychology” that organizes the plays, provides a skeptical reading of how romantic love functions in Shakespeare’s texts, and explains how the playwright understood the concepts of genre and character.

Prepositions+: The Collected Critical Essays. By Louis Zukofsky. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan Univ. Press of the Univ. Press of New England. 2000. xiii, 246 pp. Paper, $16.95.

This volume combines Prepositions—a 1967 collection of Zukofsky’s essays in which he discusses the art of poetry—with a set of Zukofsky’s uncollected work. Many of these selections have been out of print for decades. This collection, in which Zukofsky provides close readings of several modernist poets and explains his own poetics, is appropriate for both Zukofsky fans and those who need a strong introduction to his criticism, poetry, and the Objectivist movement.

The “Hasty Papers”: The Millennium Edition of the Legendary 1960 “One-Shot Review.” By Alfred Leslie. Austin, Tex.: Host Publications. 1999. 255 pp. $30.00.

When the Hasty Papers appeared in late 1960, the artistic community greeted it with as much enthusiasm as the establishment regarded it with scorn. A play by Derek Walcott stood alongside Allen Ginsberg’s poetry, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s prose...