- The Culture of Literacy
- Wlad Godzich
- Paperback / Hardcover
- The Footnote
- Anthony Grafton
- The weapon of pedants, the scourge of undergraduates, the bête noire of the "new" liberated scholar: the lowly footnote, long the refuge of the minor and the marginal, emerges in this book as a singular resource, with a surprising history that says volumes about the evolution of modern scholarship. In Anthony Grafton's engrossing account, footnotes to history give way to footnotes as history, recounting in their subtle way the curious story of the progress of knowledge in written form.
- Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 1999
- Still the New World
- Philip Fisher
- A provocative new way of accounting for the spirit of American literary tradition, Still the New World makes a persuasive argument against the reduction of literature to identity questions of race, gender, and ethnicity. Ranging from roughly 1850 to 1940 the book reconsiders key works in the American canon--from Emerson, Whitman, and Melville, to Twain, Dos Passos, and Nathanael West.
- Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2000
- Writing and Being
- Nadine Gordimer
- In this deeply resonant book, Nadine Gordimer examines the tension for a writer between life's experiences and narrative creations. She tries to unravel the mysterious process that breathes "real" life into fiction by exploring the writings of revolutionaries in South Africa and the works of Naguib Mahfouz, Chinua Achebe, and Amos Oz. Ending on a personal note, Gordimer reveals her own experience of "writing her way out of" the confines of a dying colonialism.
- Paperback 1996 / Hardcover 1998