Direct, informal, and richly evocative of his Jewish heritage and New York City home, Harvey Shapiro's poetry has occupied a unique place in American letters for over 50 years. This new collection brings together his latest work and much of his 11 previous collections, revealing the full arc of his carefully calibrated poetics. Shapiro engages themes including the immigrant experience, urban landmarks and lifestyles, family life, and war. The reader will see the more formal British-tinged cadences of his earlier work give way to the colloquial, personal nature of his later poems, and how Shapiro's candor and simplicity mark his work throughout the last five decades. Bringing the city and its balance of despair and exuberance into stark relief, this poetry is intimately attuned both to life's quiet disappointments and to its unanticipated miracles.

Dying for a Laugh looks at the evolution of the contemporary disaster film from the 1970s to the present. Ken Feil argues that contemporary camp culture has influenced and reformed the conventions of the 1970s disaster film, in both its production and reception. The book chronicles how the genre rose to prominence, sank into critical and popular disrepute, and became unintentionally campy. Through close readings of films including The Poseidon Adventure, The Swarm, Ghostbusters, Independence Day, and Mars Attacks!, along with film reviews, entertainment reports and publicity materials as evidence, Feil shows that the renewal of the disaster genre in the 1990s hinged on self-parody, ironic self-consciousness, and state-of-the-art effects. Feil also looks at the impact of 9/11 on the genre's campy, sadistic pleasures through movies such as The Sum of All Fears, The Core, and The Day After Tomorrow. This analysis of "high concept camp" draws from diverse methodologies and theories, such as historical reception, textual analysis, neoformalism, political economy, genre analysis, feminism, and queer theory.

Echo and Reverb is the first history of acoustically imagined space in popular music recording. The book documents how acoustic effects-reverberation, room ambience, and echo-have been used in recordings since the 1920s to create virtual sonic architectures and landscapes. Author Peter Doyle traces the development of these acoustically-created worlds from the ancient Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus to the dramatic acoustic architectures of the medieval cathedral, the grand concert halls of the 19th century, and those created by the humble parlor phonograph of the early 20th century, and finally, the revolutionary age of rock 'n' roll. Citing recordings ranging from Gene Austin's 'My Blue Heaven' to Elvis Presley's 'Mystery Train,' Doyle illustrates how non-musical sound constructs, with all their rich and contradictory baggage, became a central feature of recorded music. The book traces various imagined worlds created with synthetic echo and reverb-the heroic landscapes of the cowboy west, the twilight shores of south sea islands, the uncanny alleys of dark cityscapes, the weird mindspaces of horror movies, the private and collective spaces of teen experience, and the funky juke-joints of the mind.

Jules Verne (1828-1905) was the first author to popularize the literary genre of science fiction. Written in 1898 and part of the author's famous series Voyages Extraordinaires, The Mighty Orinoco tells the story of a young man's search for his father along the then-uncharted Orinoco River of Venezuela. The text contains all the ingredients of a classic Verne scientific-adventure tale: exploration and discovery, humor and drama, dastardly villains and intrepid heroes, and a host of near-fatal encounters with crocodiles, jungle fever, Indians and outlaws - all set in a wonderfully exotic locale. The Mighty Orinoco also includes a unique twist that will appeal to feminists - readers will need to discover it for themselves. This Wesleyan edition features notes, and a critical introduction by renowned Verne scholar Walter James Miller, as well as reproductions of the illustrations from the original French edition.CONTRIBUTORS: Walter James Miller, Stanford Luce, Arthur B. Evans.

When two European scientists unexpectedly inherit an Indian rajah's fortune, each builds an experimental city of his dreams in the wilds of the American Northwest. France-Ville is a harmonious urban community devoted to health and hygiene, the specialty of its French founder, Dr. François Sarrasin. Stahlstadt, or City of Steel, is a fortress-like factory town devoted to the manufacture of high-tech weapons of war. Its German creator, the fanatically pro-Aryan Herr Schultze, is Verne's first truly evil scientist. In his quest for world domination and racial supremacy, Schultze decides to showcase his deadly wares by destroying France-Ville and all its inhabitants. Both prescient and cautionary, The Begum's Millions is a masterpiece of scientific and political speculation and constitutes one of the earliest technological utopia/dystopias in Western literature. This Wesleyan edition features notes, appendices, and a critical introduction as well as all the illustrations from the original French edition.

In recent years, the Walt Disney Company has grown far beyond its beginnings in animated films and theme parks to become a major multinational corporation with global reach. As the company's activities have grown more complex and its influence more ubiquitous, both its internal practices and its attempts to control its now global public environment have generated conflicts that contradict the classic Disney publicity image. The 11 wide-ranging, interdisciplinary essays in this collection cover topics including Animal Kingdom; Gay Days at the theme parks; Disney's connection to sweatshops; commodification of The Lion King on Broadway; the transformation of Winnie the Pooh; Disney's experience in urban planning in Times Square and Celebration, Florida; and Disney's America. A comprehensive introduction contextualizes the essays and relates them to earlier Disney studies.CONTRIBUTORS include Lee Artz, Sean Griffin, Dick Hebdige, Radha Jhappan, Daiva Stasiulis, and Susan Willis.

In her newest poems, Brenda Hillman continues her exploration of nature and culture in ways that demonstrate her original place in experimental lyric traditions. Pieces of Air in the Epic is the second book of a tetrology that takes the elements-earth, air, water, fire-as its subject. As Hillman's previous collection, Cascadia, explores "earth," the present collection considers "air"-the many meanings of the word and the life-giving medium we breathe-to test a reality that is both political and personal. These formally inventive poems reexamine epic and lyric, braiding fact and dream, the social with the self. Hypnotic, spare verses use air on the page as a matrix for cultural healing; some are presided over by a feminine presence and address war in human history, while others are set in streets, parks and wilderness. There are meditations on auras, dust motes, and reading in libraries as acts of restorative memory. This work fuses animist consciousness with cautionary prophecy, and belongs to the mode of H.D. and Robert Duncan. Hillman's poetry continues to explore ways in which human life might be redeemed by imagination.

Drawing on his background as an ethnomusicologist as well as years of experience as an accomplished jazz musician, Paul Austerlitz argues that jazz-and the world-view or consciousness that surrounds it-embodies an aesthetic of inclusiveness, reaching out from its African American base to embrace all of humanity. Fans and musicians have made this claim before, but Austerlitz is the first to provide a scholarly basis for it. He examines jazz in relation to race and national identity in the U. S. and then broadens his scope to consider jazz within the African diaspora and in very different transnational scenes, from the Dominican Republic to Finland. Based on extensive fieldwork, the book explores jazz in an extraordinary range of contexts. One of the central chapters is devoted to the history of the groundbreaking Latin jazz band of Machito and his Afro-Cubans, who were inspired by the dancing of both Harlemites and Jewish mamboniks, while the final chapter includes an extensive interview with the seminal drummer Milford Graves, one of Austerlitz's mentors, who holds that music profoundly influences our biorhythms and indeed shapes our thoughts.

The Real Enough World speculates about the invention of self and world in the act of writing poems. Like orchestral movements, the poems vary in tonal qualities and speed, moving from sensibility-driven, antic poems through a deeply personal series of narratives to poems of philosophical reflection where landscape and love operate as tropes for each other. Underlying the whole is the poet's sense that the material of life, as well as language, is insoluble and impermanent-humorous, tragic, absurd, joyous. Even when the mood of the book is most surreal, it is grounded in its accounts of the real enough.

In Staging Whiteness, Mary Brewer offers close textual readings of plays by American and British 20th century playwrights-both canonical and some that fall outside the mainstream-looking at how whiteness as an identity is created onstage, and how this has changed historically. With clarity and persuasion, Brewer argues that configurations of whiteness are dispersed and reflected through discourses that range from theory to literature and common social language, and that discursive performances of whiteness are a crucial feature of everyday social interactions.Includes discussions of:G. B. Shaw's Captain Brassbound's ConversionW. Somerset Maugham's The ExplorerW.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood's The Ascent of F6Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy ApeLangston Hughes' MulattoThornton Wilder's Our TownLillian Hellman's The Little FoxesBridget Boland's The CockpitT.S. Eliot's The Cocktail PartyJohn Osborne's The EntertainerEugene O'Neill's The Iceman ComethTennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named DesireArthur Miller's A View From the BridgeEdward Albee's The American DreamAmiri Baraka's DutchmanDavid Rabe's Sticks and BonesAdrienne Kennedy's A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and WhiteEdward Bond's Early MorningJohn Arden's and Margarette D'Arcy's The Island of the MightyCaryl Churchill's Cloud NineWendy Wasserstein's The Heidi ChroniclesTony Kushner's Angels in AmericaSuzan-Lori Parks' The America PlayPhilip Osment's This Island's MineMichael Ellis' ChameleonDavid Hare's The Absence of War

Though wildly popular, daytime soaps are arguably the most denigrated and parodied of any contemporary entertainment form. For this reason, even the most devoted soap opera fans are often reticent or even secretive about the shows they love. Watching Daytime Soap Operas is a meditation on the pleasures-and displeasures-of watching and talking about daytime soap operas. In this multidisciplinary study, Louise Spence talks to 25 women about their mostly solitary viewing practices and observes many Internet chat rooms. Over 20 years in the making, the book explores the varied critical and creative ways in which the women use soap operas in their lives. Spence draws on work in reception studies, and pays particular attention to the question of what it means to be a fan. She ultimately challenges the accepted belief that soap opera viewers are passive consumers of escapist fantasy. Her study expands the current literature of this largely misunderstood television genre while making an important contribution to the field of film-TV studies.

Moving beyond the biographical and journalistic approaches of most writing on Bruce Springsteen, Born in the U.S.A. was the first major work of cultural criticism to situate Springsteen's work in the broader sweep of American history-the heir of Walt Whitman and Woody Guthrie, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King. Springsteen is an influential chronicler of our society, says Jim Cullen, a "good conservative" who preserves the traditional values of hard work, inclusive families, and genuine concern for the less fortunate. In the new edition to this landmark work, Cullen also discusses new currents in Springsteen's music since 9/11, notably his 2002 album The Rising. This Wesleyan edition includes a new foreword, introduction, and afterword. Must reading for any serious fan-or anyone who has ever been curious about what all the fuss has been about.

"When two personalities meet, an emotional storm is created." This provocative quote by renowned psychoanalyst W.R. Bion is the point of departure for Eigen's new work. In the tradition of Martin Buber, Eigen explores the broad spectrum of emotions we experience in our relatedness to others, from feelings of longing, plenitude, and fulfillment to starvation, suffocation, and blind rage. Unlike authors of "easy" self-help books, Eigen embraces the storms of life as a critical aspect of our human bond. For Eigen, the emotional storm is not pathological, but rather integral to our humanity and instrumental to our growth and development. For this reason, he looks critically at our attempts to blunt our emotional response to the world around us. Like Eigen's other work, Emotional Storm weaves case studies, literary references, and psychoanalytic theory into an integrated, complex understanding.

Continued is a selection of poems by Piotr Sommer, spanning his career to date. A kind of poetic utterance, these "talk poems" are devoid of any singsong quality yet faithfully preserve all the melodies and rhythms of colloquial speech. Events and objects of ordinary, everyday life are related and described by the speaker in a deliberately deadpan manner. Yet a closer look at the language he uses, with all its ironic inflections and subtle "intermeanings," reveals that the poem's "message" should be identified more with the way it is spoken than with what it says. The poems in this volume were translated into English with the help of other notable poets, writers, and translators, including John Ashbery, D.J. Enright, and Douglas Dunn.

Excursion for Miracles is an intimate portrait of the early choreographic careers of Donya Feuer and Paul Sanasardo, and the artistic significance of their Studio for Dance in New York City. These two dynamic individuals were committed to breaking set ways of thinking about dance in relation to life, and their work with a group of very young children and dancers such as Pina Bausch anticipated radical cultural thought of the 1960s, particularly with the unrecognized masterpiece "Laughter after All." Author Mark Franko, who danced with Sanasardo for five years, also brings to life the creativity and intimacy involved in four Feuer/Sanasardo evening-length ballets. The book is lavishly illustrated with 75 stunning black and white still shots of the dancers that capture their energy at precise moments, giving sight to the conversation and analyses surrounding them.

During its seven-year run, Buffy the Vampire Slayer attracted a wide range of viewers and almost unprecedented academic interest. Sex and the Slayer explores one of the most talked-about topics in relation to this pioneering TV series-gender. As fantasy, Buffy potentially opens up a space for alternative representations of gender. But how alternative can popular television be? Taking a feminist cultural studies approach, Jowett explores the ways in which the series represents femininity, masculinity, and gendered relations, including sexuality and sexual orientation. Written for undergraduates, Sex and the Slayer provides an introduction to the most important theoretical and historical underpinnings of contemporary gender criticism as it examines a range of thought-provoking issues: role reversal, the tension between feminism and femininity, the "crisis" of masculinity, gender hybridity, the appeal of bad girls, romance, and changing family structures. Through this introductory analysis, Jowett shows that Buffy presents a contradictory mixture of "subversive" and "conservative" images of gender roles and as such is a key example of the complexity of gender representation in contemporary television.