The Kent State University Press: 559 books

A Self-Evident Lie explores and underscores the fear and complex meaning of “slavery” to northerners before the Civil War. Many northerners asked: If slavery was the beneficent and paternalistic institution that southerners claimed, could it not be applied with equal morality to whites as well...

One of the most fascinating comments often made about Dorothy l. Sayers is that she wrote “real” novels.  Catherine Kenney considers why Sayers mysteries tend to strike astute readers this way, and in so doing, suggests her place not only in the history of detection, but in the larger tradition...

The impact of Dorothy L. Sayer’s work is a powerful one. She was a gifted artist who worked in many genres and addressed many issues, but her achievement goes beyond creative skill and variety of range. What she consistently communicates about Sin—the basic problem of human existence—provides...

This is a major work, at once synthetic and analytical. The author has drawn on previous studies of Irish music and general melodic theory to describe the inner workings of a rich melodic tradition. Irish folk music, resting upon monophonic melodies which are varied and ornamented, and thus viewed...

Throughout his professional life, Herman Melville displayed a keen interest in the visual arts. He alluded to works of art to embellish his poems and novels and made substantial use of the technique of ekphrasis, the literary description of works of visual arts, to give body to plot and character....

“The aim of this book is not to have the final word on the meaning of the stories that compose Men Without Women. Rather, the study attempts to probe the events of each story as we encounter them. It seeks to explain historical references, to identify allusions, to see how form suggests meaning.”...

“The poems in Christine Gosnay’s first book, Even Years, speak with a voice that animates and astonishes us as they delineate and explore, trace and explode, the ‘order of shapes in the light’—the order of words, of moments in a life, of shifts in perspective between the ‘cleave and /...

The experiences of an American family in the Philippines during World War II Just nine days before her seventh birthday, Virginia Hansen Holmes heard about the attack on American forces at Pearl Harbor and wondered if this was going to change her life. She lived on the Philippine Island of...

Various factors in late 16th-century England contributed to an environment more hospitable to prose fiction than had existed previously-among them, changes in educational opportunities, socioeconomic structures, literacy rates, and access to European literature. Such cultural alterations inevitably...

Published in 1937, Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not is that rare example of a novel whose cultural impact far outweighs its critical reputation. Long criticized for its fragmented form, its ham-fisted approach to politics, and its hard-boiled obsession with cojones, this blistering tale of...

The brutal murder of Julia Wallace in 1931 became one of Britain’s great unsolved murders. People began arguing about the case almost immediately and continue to do so to this day. Julia was the middle-aged wife of a mild-mannered Liverpool insurance agent, William Herbert Wallace. By all...

Examines the motives of terrorists, from ancient Greece to the present day “A unique work of. . . history, made all the more interesting by its relevance to the time in which we live.” —James R. Elkins, editor of Legal Studies Forum In this timely study of the roots of terrorism,...

Jacob Jennings Brown may well be the most successful—yet forgotten—general of his time. Born into a Pennsylvania Quaker family on the eve of the American Revolution, Brown worked as a Quaker schoolteacher and surveyor and was a pioneer settler of northern New York before serving in the U.S. Army...

Written over a thirty-year period, the essays included in this volume develop one central theme: the completion of American isolationism in the formative years of the nation. Isolationism, in Kaplan’s view, is not to be taken as economic or cultural independence but as abstention from political...