Books published by Lehigh University Press

Striving to develop interdisciplinary dialogue, the essays in this work explore children's and young adult reading through the theoretical lens of "mediation." They interrogate how values and assumptions about the effects of reading underpin reading practices, facilitation of reading and the study of reading, literature and print culture.

Dedicated to the scholarship of Elizabeth Robertson, Gender, Poetry, and the Form of Thought in Later Medieval Literature is a collection of essays that explore how gender in medieval English literature intersects with philosophy, poetry, history, and religion.

The memoirs of Sister Ying Mulan describe her experiences as a Chinese Christian living in a turbulent era marked by the Communist takeover, the Cultural Revolution, and many momentous political reforms. Born into a family of politically active Catholics, Ying Mulan was eventually imprisoned in Shanghai and later sent to serve in labor camps for over twenty years. While living through such difficult circumstances, Ying Mulan derived strength from her faith. At the age of 60, she became a religious sister, and twenty-five years later she decided to write her autobiography. In this book, Francis Morgan offers the first English translation of Sr. Ying's memoirs, providing explanatory notes based on historical research and a series of extensive interviews with Sr. Ying. As she recounts the trials that she and others endured, Sr. Ying speaks with a remarkable tone of gratitude, giving thanks to God for the tests that steeled her character, tempered her pride, and increased her compassion. While her work stands out as a modern spiritual autobiography, it also deserves recognition as a political text. Sr. Ying's memoirs offer valuable and rare insights into the realities of religious life in China, the hidden world of labor camps and prisons, and the extremes of Cultural Revolution.

Drawing on the methods of textual and reception studies, book history, print culture research, and visual culture, this interdisciplinary study of James Thomson's The Seasons (1730) understands the text as marketable commodity and symbolic capital which throughout its extended affective presence in the marketplace for printed literary editions shaped reading habits. At the same time, through the addition of paratexts such as memoirs of Thomson, notes, and illustrations, it was recast by changing readerships, consumer fashions, and ideologies of culture. The book investigates the poem's cultural afterlife by charting the prominent place it occupied in the visual cultures of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. While the emphasis of the chapters is on printed visual culture in the form of book illustrations, the book also features discussions of paintings and other visual media such as furniture prints. Reading illustrations of iconographic moments from The Seasons as paratextual, interpretive commentaries that reflect multifarious reading practices as well as mentalities, the chapters contextualise the editions in light of their production and interpretive inscription. They introduce these editions' publishers and designers who conceived visual translations of the text, as well as the engravers who rendered these designs in the form of the engraving plate from which the illustration could then be printed. Where relevant, the chapters introduce non-British illustrated editions to demonstrate in which ways foreign booksellers were conscious of British editions of The Seasons and negotiated their illustrative models in the sets of engraved plates they commissioned for their volumes.

The historical analysis, theological reflections, and sociological observations found in the chapters of Christian Social Activism and the Rule of Law in Chinese Societies reveal the vibrant influence of Christian individuals and groups on social, political, and legal activism in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and diasporic communities.

The Wesleys and the Anglican Mission to Georgia examines the lives of five minister/missionaries in Georgia from 1735 to 1738 just before three of them became famous throughout the Atlantic world. Personal relationships shaped every facet of the Mission, while they used Biblical literature to frame and explain their experiences.

Placing Charlotte Smith offers new insights into how Romantic-era author Charlotte Smith expressed a cosmopolitan vision of place in an era of intense nationalism. The authors examine Smith's place as a writer in her time and the way she helped to make "place" a thing of social and literary importance.

Interweaving lost articles by the Osage author, naturalist, and historian, John Joseph Mathews with insightful commentaries and essays by his biographer, Michael Snyder, Our Osage Hills tells a fascinating story of the Whazhazhe people in the Great Depression period and beyond.

The Collected Letters of Mary Blachford Tighe provides a revelatory glimpse into the life and mind of Ireland's premier Romantic-era woman poet. Although Tighe's family burned most of her personal papers, 166 letters by and to her survived the flames, and are printed here for the first time.

Using methods from book history and print culture studies, Annotation in Eighteenth-Century Poetry explores the functions that annotation performed on and through the printed page. Studying the relation of notes to poetry and the evolving layout of the book, this collection extends to recent inquiries into the rise of literature as a discipline.

Sir John Hill (17141775) was one of Georgian England's most vilified men despite having contributed prolifically to its medicine, science and literature. Born into a humble Northamptonshire family, the son of an impecunious God-faring Anglican minister, he started out as an apothecary, went on to collect natural objects for the great Whig lords and became a botanist of distinction. But his scandalous behavior prevented his election to the Royal Society and entry to all other professions for which he was qualified. Today, we can understand his actions as the result of a personality disorder; then he was understood entirely in moral terms. When he saw the dye cast he turned to journalism and publication, and strove maniacally to succeed without patronage. As a writer he was also cut down in ferocious ';paper wars'. Yet by the time he died, he had been knighted by the Swedish monarch and become a household name among scientists and writers throughout Britain and Europe. His life was a series of paradoxes without coherence, perhaps because he was above all a provocateur.In time he would also become a filter for the century in which he lived: its personalitiesgreat and smallas well as the broad canvas of its culture, and for this reason any biography necessarily stretches beyond the man himself to those whose profiles he also illuminates.

In Rugged Individualism and the Misunderstanding of American Inequality, the authors argue that a culture of individualism in the U.S. limits the pressure politicians face to develop robust social policies. This individualism combines with racism and features of the political system to help perpetuate high levels of poverty and inequality.

This collection of letters provides a detailed eyewitness account of the Japanese conquest and occupation of central China in 1937-1938, as seen from Hangzhou by a Protestant missionary. As an American neutral, the author offers unique perspectives on the dilemmas of faith and partisanship, that the Sino-Japanese conflict posed.

Anglo-German Dramatic and Poetic Encounters contains essays focusing on the roles of drama and poetry in Anglo-German exchange in the Sattelzeit. It offers new perspectives on the movement of texts and ideas across genres and cultures, the formation and reception of poetic personae, and the place of illustration in cross-cultural, textual exchange.

Gateways to Empire: Quebec and New Amsterdam to 1664 by Daniel Weeks is the first comprehensive comparative study of the North American fur-trading colonies New France and New Netherland. Weeks traces the evolution of Quebec and New Amsterdam from hubs for trade with the Indians to gateways for European settlement.

Fiddled out of Reason examines Addison's poetic oeuvre in context of the nondevotional hymn, an underexplored genre of eighteenth-century verse. It concentrates on poems such as Addison's Cecilian odes, Rosamond, and five hymnic works for The Spectator, as well as Dryden's "Song for St Cecilia's Day" and "Alexander's Feast" and Pope's "Messiah."

The "War Scrap Book" of Matilda Joslyn Gage: Witness to Rebellion is a notable nineteenth-century American feminist's final contribution to her oeuvre, a first-hand glimpse-with full explications-of the Civil War and its aftermath as seen through the lens of newspaper clippings of the era.

Combining research-based methodology with pedagogical narratives, this book is a valuable resource for teachers, researchers, program administrators, and methods course instructors. This practical guide includes eleven ready-to-use teaching cases that offer compelling accounts of the political, institutional, and curricular issues facing teachers.

Rewriting Early America argues the need for a subtler understanding of how post-1945 literary figures represent America's prenational past. Rather than focusing only on how literary representations of the national origins advance political critiques, this book also recognizes the recuperative visions founds in many recent novels and poems.

This book explores the Erie Railway's contributions to nineteenth-century visual culture by promoting scenic thinking in which closely viewed scenes and deep prospects became the basis for engaging landscapes and their representations. Erie guides became commentary on landscape, with images and texts as annotations on the production of culture.

The book is a tool designed to aid scholars in their efforts to elucidate Gil Vicente's works and, at the same time, will prove useful for students who embark on a voyage into the world created by this dramatist.

John Updike wrote about his home town of Reading in Berks County, Pennsylvania for much of his adult life, setting most of his early fiction and novels in his home state. In John Updike's Pennsylvania Interviews James Plath has compiled the first collection of interviews that illustrates the bond between author and his beloved Pennsylvania.

Using methods from book history and print culture studies, Annotation in Eighteenth-Century Poetry explores the functions that annotation performed on and through the printed page. Studying the relation of notes to poetry and the evolving layout of the book, this collection extends to recent inquiries into the rise of literature as a discipline.

This study investigates interpretation of a late-fourteenth-century fictional character in both verbal and visual art of the period 1660-1810. Audiovisual analysis and diachronic afterlife studies intertwine concerning the Wife of Bath in songs, scholarship, commentary, poetic paraphrases, musical theater in London and on the Continent, paintings, and book illustrations.