While our faculty members are prolific in publishing scholarly articles, full-length books, whether monographs, linguistic analyses, or translations, are an achievement worthy of celebration, even for busy scholars. We are happy to highlight the book publications of our faculty members in the past year.
Book publication itself is the focus of Associate Professor Nicolas Valazza’s monograph La Poésie délivrée. Le livre en question du Parnasse à Mallarmé (Geneva: Droz, 2018). The French poets of the second half of the 19th century whose works are now part of the French literary canon struggled to find publishers, and after finding the doors of traditional publishing houses closed to them, they found new ways of disseminating their works, such as collective volumes, small literary journals, albums, and artists’ books. “The purpose of this book,” according to the publisher’s website, “is to show how such a proliferation of mediums contributed to the renewal of poetic forms at the end of the nineteenth century and, ultimately, to the reinvention of the poetry book.”
On the Linguistics side of the Department, Associate Professor Kevin Rottet has co-authored, with Steve Morris, the book-length study Comparative Stylistics of Welsh and English (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018). Rottet, who is on the executive committee of the North American Association for Celtic Language Teachers, is a specialist of both Welsh and Breton. In their study, Rottet and Morris (Swansea University, Wales) compare and contrast the linguistic structure of Welsh and English through the window of a parallel corpus of over 30 novels and autobiographies from the late 19th century to the present. The work is of potential interest to linguists, to advanced students of Welsh, and to translators.
Professor Emeritus Samuel N. Rosenberg’s translation of Robert le Diable (Robert the Devil), an anonymous French romance of the 13th century, was published by Penn State University Press in 2018. This is the first English translation of the influential medieval tale of Robert, conceived with the aid of Satan, who tries to redeem himself after a youth of evil behavior. The journal French Studies declared the volume “A welcome, engaging translation of an often underrated romance.” The work includes a thoughtful introduction and a thorough bibliography.
A culmination of research begun in the 1980s, the book Life in God’s Country, by Professor Emeritus Edoardo Lèbano was published by The Daily Clintonian in 2018. The work consists of interviews with Italian immigrants who settled in Clinton, Indiana, in Vermillion County, from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, as well as immigration records of these families. Around the turn of that century, Clinton had a population of approximately 15,000 people, about one-third of whom were Italian.
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