Books published by Ohio State University Press

Electoral significance has always distinguished the small northern state sandwiched between Lake Erie and the Ohio River. Only twice since the beginning of the twentieth century has Ohio failed to pick the candidate who ultimately won the presidential election. But presidential elections are only part of the Ohio story. That''s because the state has always been an innovator, an incubator, and a bellwether for the American experience. In a unique look at Ohio, David E. Rohr chronicles key stories that come from the Buckeye State and the remarkable effect Ohio''s development has had on the larger country. The United States of Ohio covers little-known facts about Ohio, such as how the state was the birthplace of both the National Football League and Major League Baseball and how it was Ohioans who led efforts toward racial integration in both sports. Readers will learn what makes the state a manufacturing and agricultural powerhouse-with both the largest tire company, Akron''s Goodyear, and the largest consumer products company, Cincinnati''s Proctor & Gamble, based there. The state grows, processes, and builds on a level that far outpaces the size of its population or expanse of its borders. And it is the birthplace of many prominent US figures-from Thomas Edison to John Glenn to Neil Armstrong. From sports to a century''s worth of entertainment superstars to aviation and space exploration, Ohio''s best have made for America''s greatest stories-all captured here in a look at the Buckeye State and its impact on the other forty-nine.    

Focuses on the materiality of hands to show the role that the hand plays in Victorian literature and culture.

The essays included in this collection seek to take the pulse of recent developments in narratological research in the French-speaking countries. Theorists in these countries heavily participated in and shaped narratology, an outgrowth of the structuralist movement during the 1960s and 1970s. While US, German, and Scandinavian theorists took the forefront in the 1990s, narratology in France faded into the background. It was not until the turn of the century that a new interest in narratological issues among French researchers emerged. Activity in the field has since intensified, spurred on, in part, by the realization that narratology cannot be summed up by its formalist and structuralist origins. Well-versed in French narrative theory, both classical and more recent, the authors in this collection also draw on scholarship coming from other research traditions. The result is that these contributions offer a number of syntheses and perspectives representative of recent French-language scholarship in the field that readers may not be familiar with or that provide them with further insight into subjects they may have encountered in other contexts. This volume will leave readers with a greater awareness of the directions taken by present-day French-language narratology as well as new and developing themes in narrative theory generally. Contributors Raphaël Baroni, Denis Bertrand, Olivier Caïra, Claude Calame, Benoît Hennaut, Françoise Lavocat, Sylvie Patron, John Pier, Françoise Revaz, and Richard Saint-Gelais

In Romanticism's Other Minds: Poetry, Cognition, and the Science of Sociability, John Savarese reassesses early relationships between Romantic poetry and the sciences, uncovering a prehistory of cognitive approaches to literature and demonstrating earlier engagement of cognitive approaches than has heretofore been examined at length. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers framed poetry as a window into the mind's original, underlying structures of thought and feeling. While that Romantic argument helped forge a well-known relationship between poetry and introspective or private consciousness, Savarese argues that it also made poetry the staging ground for a more surprising set of debates about the naturally social mind. From James Macpherson's forgeries of ancient Scottish poetry to Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, poets mined traditional literatures and recent scientific conjectures to produce alternate histories of cognition, histories that variously emphasized the impersonal, the intersubjective, and the collective. By bringing together poetics, philosophy of mind, and the physiology of embodied experience-and with major studies of James Macpherson, Anna Letitia Barbauld, William Wordsworth, and Walter Scott-Romanticism's Other Minds recovers the interdisciplinary conversations at the heart of Romantic-era literary theory.

In the first published book-length study of Indian fiction in South Africa, Pallavi Rastogi demonstrates that Indians desire South African citizenship in the fullest sense of the word, a longing for inclusion that is asserted through an "Afrindian" identity. Afrindian Fictions: Diaspora, Race, and National Desire in South Africa examines Afrindian identity and blurs the racial binary of black and white interaction in South African studies as well as unsettles the East-West paradigm of migration dominant in South Asian diaspora studies. While offering incisive analyses of the work of the most important South African Indian writers today--Ahmed Essop, Farida Karodia, Achmat Dangor, Imraan Coovadia, and Praba Moodley among others--the author also places South African Indian fiction within broader literary traditions. Rastogi's project of recovery shines a light on the rich but neglected literature by South African Indians. The book closes with interviews conducted with six key South African Indian writers. Here the authors not only reflect on their own writing but also comment on many of the issues raised in the book itself, particularly the role of Indians in South Africa today, and the status of South African Indian writing. Afrindian Fictions is a valuable introduction to South African Indian literature as well as a major interrogation of some of the foundational notions of post-colonial literary studies.