In Print

Michael Aceto, along with Jeffrey Williams, edited Contact Englishes of the Eastern Caribbean published by Benjamin, Johns Pub. Co. as part of the Varieties of English Around the World series.  This is the first collection to focus, via primary linguistic fieldwork, on the underrepresented and neglected area of the Anglophone Eastern Caribbean.  The following islands are included: The Virgin Islands (US & British), Anguilla, Barbuda, Dominica, St. Lucia, Carriacou, Barbados, Trinidad, and Guyana.  In an effort to be as inclusive as possible, the contiguous areas of the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos islands (often considered part of North American Englishes) are also included.  Papers in this volume explore all aspects of language study, including syntax, phonology, historical linguistics, dialectology, sociolinguistics, ethnography, and performance.  It should be of interest not only to creolists but also to linguists, anthropologists, sociologists and educators either in the Caribbean itself or those who work with schoolchildren of West Indian descent.  Aceto co-wrote the introduction and authored the chapter titled, "What are Creole languages? An alternative approach to the Anglophone Atlantic world with special emphasis on Barbudan Creole English."

Tina Register's poem, "The Buzzing HIV(e)," was published in the April 2003 issue of a&u
magazine, America's AIDS magazine.

Bryan Oesterreich's article about the origins and the current state of offshore fishing on the Outer Banks, "Gone Fishing," was published in Our State magazine July 2003.  The essay tells the story of the Foster family, who started a charter offshore fishing business in Hatteras back in 1937.  The Foster family still operates the Albatross Fleet today.

Roger C. Schlobin's "Character, the Fantastic, and the Failure of Contemporary Literary Theory"  was published in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 13 (2003).  Responding to Norman N. Holland's reference to historical characters that the character "survives only in high-school teaching, in The New York Times Book Review, and the writings of Miss Mary McCarthy who, in this context, keeps strange company indeed," this essay examines the pivotal places of secondary characters in the literature of the fantastic.

Gay Wilentz has published a review essay, "'What is Africa to Me?': Reading the African Cultural Base of (African) American Literary History," in American Literary History 15 (3) Fall 2003.  The focus of the essay is to examine the significance of African cultural heritage of American literature through contemporary works and to present the viewpoint of Wilentz's research on literature in Africa and the Diaspora.  Wilentz writes, "It is fairly evident in this age of ethnic heritage and identity why an understanding of African-based cultures is relevant for African Americans.  Still, in the exploration of cultural illness in my book, Healing Narratives: Women Writers Curing Cultural Dis-Ease, there are values encoded in African-based culture from ecological to social that have implications for us all.  While presenting different perspectives on how these traditions are encoded in our cultural and literary history, ... we cannot separate these aspects of our national culture from the European ones, and only through further exploration and acknowledgment of this diverse influence will we begin to comprehend our true roots."

Margaret Bauer's  essay, "Forget the Legend and Read the Work: Teaching Two Stories by Ernest Hemingway," appeared in College Literature 30.3 (2003).  Bauer uses two stories by Ernest Hemingway, "Indian Camp" and "Hills Like White Elephants," to show students that they should not make assumptions about a writer's work based on some vague impression they have of the author's character.  According to Bauer, "an image of Hemingway as some macho hunter, drinker, womanizer, and misogynist, for example, could blind the reader to any positive reading of his female characters."

C.W. Sullivan III's article, "Folklore and Fantastic Literature," was published in Western Folklore 60.4 (2001), which (due to a publishing backlog) appeared in the summer of 2003.  The article discusses the aesthetic and thematic ways in which science fiction and fantasy authors use actual folklore as well as create folklore indigenous to the worlds in which their stories are set.

Maya Socolovsky's  "Deconstructing a Secret History: Trace, Translation and Crypto-Judaism in Achy Obejas's Days of Awe," was published in Contemporary Literature 44:2 (Summer 2003).  Socolovsky writes: "Focusing on a first-person, Cuban-American narrator who is descended from generations of clandestine Spanish Jews exiled to Cuba during the Inquisition, Days of Awe both traces the collective fear, violence, and deception in the lives of centuries of crypto-Jews (known as marranos or conversos ­ forcibly Christianized Jews), and examines the ways in which this painful legacy haunts the present generation.  The text thus moves between different kinds of narrative, and frustrates a reading that would focus solely on its ethnic content or its historical aspect by blurring and complicating the notions of ethnicity, history, and historical narrative.  The text performs the very impossibility of defining or speaking of hidden Judaism, and the meaning of crypto-Judaism comes to refer to the not-there, the non-present, and the ghosts that inhabit these spaces of non-presence."

Peter Makuck's Costly Habits received a capsule review in the Dictionary of Literary Biography under "Outstanding Short Story Collections of 2002."  Makuck's essay-review, "Worthy First Books," is in the current issue of The Laurel Review, and his review of Andrew Hudgin's Ecstatic in the Poison: New Poems (Penguin Putnam 2003) appeared in The News & Observer on August 24.

The 2003 edition of the North Carolina Literary Review, featuring "Aviation in North Carolina Literature and Letters," celebrates the 100th anniversay of the Wright Brothers' first flight. Included in this special issue are rare, unpublished cyanotypes of the Wright Brothers on the Outer Banks and an interview with with North Carolina novelist, Clyde Edgerton, in which he discusses his experiences as a pilot for the US Air Force during the Vietnam War.

Doug McMillan's review essay,"The Reformation, the Bible in English (1557-1582), Some Popular Pamphlets, and Some Popular Plays of Jonson and Shakespeare," was published in Religion and the Arts 7 (2003).  The review considers five books: The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post Reformation England (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2002) by Peter Lake with Michael Questier; Diarmaid MacCulloch's The Boy King:  Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (New York: Palgrave Books Division of Saint Martin's Press, 1999); Cameron A. MacKenzie's  The Battle for the Bible in England, 1557-1582  (New York and Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2002); Richard Marius's  Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999); and William Tyndale's The Obedience of a Christian Man edited and introduced by David Daniell (New York: Penguin Books, 2000).  McMillan writes: "Each of the books discussed in this essay makes a major contribution to our continuing efforts to better understand the Reformation and the Counter Reformation in England.  Together they move us forward significantly in these endeavors.  The religious and political and social lives we live today have deep roots in the past.  The better we understand this past, the better chance we have to know ourselves.  The authors of these books have used history and literature to enhance our knowledge of the religious experiences of our predecessors.  If we, indeed, are in a time of reformation parallel in many ways to that of the Reformation, we can use all the genuine help present and past available to us.  I recommend these five books as appropriate starting places."

Gregg A. Hecimovich's American edition of Anthony Trollope's Phineas Redux has been published by Penguin Classics USA (August 26, 2003).  The UK edition of the book was published by Penguin UK last spring (April 2003).  This new edition includes an introduction by Hecimovich, a corrected and corroborated text of the novel, notes on the text, explanatory notes, a chronology of Trollope's life, and a bibliography.  Phineas Redux is the fourth of six works in what Trollope termed his 'parliamentary novels', also known as the Palliser series.  Published over the course of fifteen years, Trollope regarded the series as his 'greatest work' and scholars frequently cite the two Phineas novels, Phineas Finn (1869) and Phineas Redux (1874), as the greatest political novels in the English language.