In Print

Jerry Leath Mills's essay review, "Civil War and Collateral Damage," appeared in North Carolina Literary Review 11 (2002) and considers the Civil War novel by Josephine Humphreys, Nowhere Else on Earth (Viking, 2000), about the strife of Rhoda Strong, a Lumbee Indian living in Robeson County, North Carolina in the final days of the Civil War, and Charles F. Price's The Cock's Spur (John F. Blair, 2000), the final novel of his Civil War trilogy set in the mountains of North Carolina.  Price's trilogy begins with Hiwassee (1996) set during the Civil War then continues with the 1999 Sir Walter Raleigh Award Winner Freedom's Altar that takes place in the days following the end of the war.

Marie Farr reviewed Literary Feminisms by Ruth Robbins (St. Martin's, 2000) in Feminist Teacher 14:1 (Winter/Spring 2002).  From the publisher: "Robbins's book attempts to describe the fundamentals of feminist theory in practical discussions about literature.  She discusses a range of theorists from Wollstonecraft to Kristeva, pointing out the intersection of materialist, psychoanalytic, and literary accounts of feminist thought.  She also provides exemplary readings of such texts as Wilde's and Gilman's."

Donald Palumbo recently published his study of the work of Isaac Asimov titled "'Snatching Victory from the Jaws of Defeat': Twenty Fractal Variations on a Theme in the Conclusions of Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation Metaseries" in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 12:4 (Summer 2002).  A publication of Florida Atlantic University, the Journal, in its 10th year, is "a multidisciplinary quarterly devoted to the study of the fantastic in Literature, Art, Drama, Film, and Popular Media."

Gay Wilentz's essay "The Voices of the Ancestors through the Words of Writers: Teaching the Diaspora from an African Cultural Base" has been reprinted as a chapter in Palavers of African Literature: Essays in Honor of Bernth Lindfors (Africa World P, 2002).  Wilentz also edited Memories, Dreams, and Nightmares: a Short Story Anthology of Belizean Women Writers (Cubola Press, 2002).

C.W. Sullivan III's essay, "Y Mabinogion a Ffuglen Ffantasi America," appears in Gweld Sêr: Cymru a Chanrif America (U of Wales P, 2002), an anthology of essays edited by M. Wynn Thomas.  This collection of essays in Welsh on the intercultural links between Wales and the United States, and Sullivan's essay deals with the Welsh influence on American writers of High Fantasy.

Margaret Bauer's essay, "Ellen Gilchrist's Women Who Would Be Queens (and Those Who Would Dethrone Them)," was published in Mississippi Quarterly 55 (2001-02).  Bauer writes, "Gilchrist is at her best when she writes about these Southern debutantes of the 50s, whose education inspired ambition, but whose ambitions were thwarted by their own families."

Wendy Sharer's "Rhetorical Education for Political Action: The League of Women Voters and the Subversion of Political Parties in the 1920s" has been collected in Professing Rhetoric: Selected Papers from the 2000 Rhetoric Society of America Conference edited by Frederick J. Antczak, Cinda Coggins, and Geoffrey D. Klinger (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002).  Sharer observes that historical accounts of instruction in rhetoric and composition have traditionally charted academic methods of training students to be competent writers and speakers.  This article extends historical accounts of rhetorical education  by considering how suffragists reorganized themselves following the passage of the 19th Amendment to form the League of Women Voters, an organization that aimed to teach techniques of political persuasion to newly enfranchised women so that those women might become effective writers and speakers within electoral politics.

Peter Makuck's review essay, "Boats Against the Current," appeared in The Laurel Review, (Summer 2002).  In this essay, Makuck considers Michael McFee's  Earthly (Carnegie Mellon UP, 2001) and Laure-Anne Bosselaar's Small Gods of Grief (BOA Editions, 2001).  He writes: "Exorcism and refusal, ridding oneself of pain or saying no to the unacceptable is no less true for poets.  This process is partly at work in the poetry of Michael McFee and Laure-Anne Bosselaar.  Beyond garnering prizes (McFee, co-recipient of the Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry; Bosselaar, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award), the two books under review have a number of other things in common: both writers have children and are past the traditional midpoint of their lives; both work though painful memories of deceased parents; both exhibit a certain nostalgie de la croyance; and both produce work born of a religious ache, a struggle to affirm a life of the spirit.  Their differences are largely rooted in place and perspective--McFee a North Carolinian, Bosselaar a native of Brussels, Belgium."

Makuck's poems, "Today's Weather" and "Chickadees," appeared in Orion (Spring 2002); "For the Woman at the Pier" in Rattle (Summer 2002); and "from Notations" in Blink (July-August 2002).

Michael Aceto's "Ethnic Personal Names and Multiple Identities in Anglophone Caribbean Speech Communities in Latin America" was published in Language in Society 31:4 (2002) edited by Jane Hill of the University of Arizona. Language in Society is "an international journal of sociolinguistics concerned with all branches of speech and language as aspects of social life."  Issued by Cambridge University Press, the publication can be accessed through Cambridge Journals Online (www.journals.cambridge.org).

Seodial Deena has published two abstracts: "A Postcolonial and Feminist Perspective of the Role of Nature as an Instrument of Resistance in Caribbean Literature" in the abstracts of the Association of Caribbean Studies (Lexington, KY: ACS, 2002) and "Colonialism and Capitalism: 'The love of money is the root of all evil' in Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea" in the abstracts of the Ninth International Conference on the Literature of Region and Nation Conference (Durban, S.A.: University of Natal, 2002).