Books published by Ohio State University Press

Just as gorillas have a special allure for zoo visitors around the world, the Columbus, Ohio, zoo has a special place in the history of the care and captive breeding of the greatest of the great apes. Columbus was the site of the world''s first captive gorilla birth in 1956, and in the more than four decades that have followed since that historic day, twenty-six more gorillas have been born into the Columbus Zoo gorilla family. Gorillas in Our Midst chronicles the characters and events that have made the Columbus gorilla program world renowned. From the brutal capture of the zoo''s first gorillas in the rain forests of Africa to the birth and mother-rearing of a fourth generation of offspring, author Jeff Lyttle takes the reader through the triumphs and tragedies of a captive gorilla program that is on the leading edge of the effort to preserve the endangered western lowland gorilla. Among the fascinating events Lyttle narrates are the birth of Colo, the world''s first captive-born gorilla, now the mother of three, the grandmother of fifteen, and the great-grandmother of two gorillas, and still going strong at the age of forty. He also tells the story of the first gorilla twins born in the Western Hemisphere-Macombo and Mosuba-as they grow from playful infants to important members of gorilla troops at two American zoos. Lyttle has interviewed more than twenty current and former members of the Columbus Zoo staff to recount the details of this compelling story. Jack Hanna, well-known Columbus Zoo Director Emeritus, provides the foreword for a book that will be easy to pick up and hard to put down.Jeff Lyttle is a graduate of The Ohio State University and has worked as a professional writer and corporate communicator for more than twelve years. He has written for several popular and industry newspapers, newsletters, and magazines.

Studies in the Age of Chaucer is the annual yearbook of the New Chaucer Society, publishing articles on the writing of Chaucer and his contemporaries, their antecedents and successors, and their intellectual and social contexts. More generally, articles explore the culture and writing of later medieval Britain (1200-1500). Each SAC volume also includes an annotated bibliography and reviews of Chaucer-related publications.

In Syphilis: Medicine, Metaphor, and Religious Conflict in Early Modern France, Deborah Losse examines how images of syphilis became central to Renaissance writing and reflected more than just the rapid spread of this new and poorly understood disease. Losse argues that early modern writers also connected syphilis with the wars of religion in sixteenth-century France. These writers, from reform-minded humanists to Protestant poets and Catholic polemicists, entered the debate from all sides by appropriating the disease as a metaphor for weakening French social institutions. Catholics and Protestants alike leveled the charge of paillardise (lechery) at one another. Losse demonstrates how they adopted the language of disease to attack each other''s politics, connecting diseased bodies with diseased doctrine.Losse provides close readings of a range of genres, moving between polemical poetry, satirical narratives, dialogical colloquies, travel literature, and the personal essay. With chapters featuring Erasmus, Rabelais, Montaigne, Léry, and Agrippa d''Aubigné, this study compares literary descriptions of syphilis with medical descriptions. In the first full-length study of Renaissance writers'' engagement with syphilis, Deborah Losse charts a history from the most vehement rhetoric of the pox to a tenuous resolution of France''s conflicts, when both sides called for a return to order.

In Detecting the Nation, Reitz argues that detective fiction was essential both to public acceptance of the newly organized police force in early Victorian Britain and to acclimating the population to the larger venture of the British Empire. In doing so, Reitz challenges literary-historical assumptions that detective fiction is a minor domestic genre that reinforces a distinction between metropolitan center and imperial periphery. Rather, Reitz argues, nineteenth-century detective fiction helped transform the concept of an island kingdom to that of a sprawling empire; detective fiction placed imperialism at the center of English identity by recasting what had been the suspiciously un-English figure of the turn-of-the-century detective as the very embodiment of both English principles and imperial authority. She supports this claim through reading such masters of the genre as Godwin, Dickens, Collins, and Doyle in relation to narratives of crime and empire such as James Mill's History of British India, narratives about Thuggee, and selected writings of Kipling and Buchan. Detective fiction and writings more specifically related to the imperial project, such as political tracts and adventure stories, were inextricably interrelated during this time.

Appealing to audiences interested in the histories of medicine, women, gender, labor, and social policy, Beyond the Reproductive Body examines women's health in relation to work in early Victorian England. Government officials and reformers investigating the laboring population became convinced that the female body would be ruined by gainful employment, making women incapable of reproducing a healthy labor force. Women's work was thus framed as a public health "problem." Poor women were caught between the contradictory expectations of the reproductive body, which supposedly precluded any but domestic labor, and the able body, which dictated that all poor but healthy people must work to stay independent of state assistance. Medical case narratives of female patients show that while official pronouncements emphasized the physical limitations of the female reproductive body, poor women adopted an able-bodied norm. Beyond the Reproductive Body demonstrates the centrality of gender and the body in the formation of Victorian policies concerning employment, public health, and welfare. Focusing on poor women, it challenges historians' customary presentations of Victorian women's delicate health. The medical case narratives give voices to poor women, who have left very few written records of their own.Marjorie Levine-Clark is assistant professor of history at the University of Colorado, Denver.

Shadeland is not only the name of the Illinois farm on which poet Andrew Grace was raised, it is also that elusive space where language attempts to recover all that has been lost. Deeply concerned with the state of today''s rural spaces, Grace''s poems describe a landscape and a lifestyle that are both eroding. Stylistically rangy, yet united by an ardent eye for intricate imagery, Shadeland features allusions and influences as classical as Homer, Virgil, and Hopkins while still exhibiting a poetic sensibility that is thoroughly contemporary. Employing a blend of baroque and innovative language, these 21st-century pastorals and anti-pastorals both celebrate and elegize the buckshot-peppered silos and unstill cornfields that are quietly vanishing from the countryside.