New Books Fall 2023

Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (University of Pennsylvania Press) is the latest book from L&L Associate Professor Jolene Zigarovich. This monograph explores understandings of mortality via Enlightenment-era secularism and examines how bodily commodification altered experiences of dying and mourning in England during the 1700s. Zigarovich marks this period as the start of “a modern attitude toward the dead body, an approach that gets narrativized and archived in a largely secular, empirical medium: fiction.” While this study explores the work of major writers of the period, such as Samuel Richardson, it also draws on an impressive array of historical sources, including wills, sermons and anatomy books.
 

Cover, Recover is a poetry chapbook by English MA alum Seth Thill. As the 2022 Hartman Reserve Visiting Artist, Thill wrote this collection of poems examining the disparate influences of nature and popular culture. Each cover is individually created as a hand pressed linocut print. As Thill writes, “these are poems about restlessness, about identity, and sometimes about Slipknot.” Cover, Recover has also recently been released in an audiobook version on Bandcamp.
 

Stellaphasia is a posthumous collection of poems by English MA alum Jason Bradford and published by NAR press. The poems in Stellaphasia consist of Bradford’s posthumously defended MFA thesis at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. Bradford was born with muscular dystrophy, and from the age of five, he relied on a motorized wheelchair. A number of the poems in Stellaphasia directly address this condition and his everyday experiences as a differently-abled individual. Other poems offer careful observations that were a hallmark of his writing (and account for his interest in the work of photographer Vivian Maier, the subject of several poems). You can also read a memorial post about Jason Bradford at the Kenyon Review Online.