Explore the vast range of titles available.

This essay explores the challenges of creating a detective with dementia in Mitch Cullin's A Slight Trick of the Mind (2005), Adele LaPlante's Turn of Mind (2011) and Emma Healey's Elizabeth Is Missing (2014). As these metaphysical narratives feature paradoxes of identity, they can help destigmatize this devastating condition.

Drawing on the work of Robert J. C. Young, the author argues that Jassy Mackenzie and Margie Orford's crime novels of post-apartheid South Africa offer coping strategies in the face of inexplicable violence. As they fundamentally are about living with terror and terrorism, they resonate with contemporary American readers. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Within the emerging genre of Iranian women's memoirs, Farideh Goldin'sWedding Song(2003) and Roya Hakakian'sJourney from the Land of No(2004) are distinctive in that their authors are Jewish. While Goldin and Hakakian share the nostalgia and sense of loss expressed by their fellow memoirists in exile, they offer a nuanced reading of Iranian culture that reflects their dual consciousness of being both Iranian and Jewish, identities that have sometimes been in conflict. Their differing accounts and impressions of growing up in observant Jewish families testify to the diversity of Iranian Jews. In addition to serving as historians of Iran's recent past—Goldin relates events leading up to the Islamic Revolution, while Hakakian relates events that took place during and after it—they critique and commemorate Iranian Jewish life, especially the lives of women. As women writers, they trace the importance of words and stories in their lives, and the destructive role of both censorship and self-censorship.

Set in Virginia during Reconstruction, Elsie's Motherhood, the fifth volume of Martha Finley's best-selling 19th-century American series has a remarkable plot for two reasons. First, Finley's stubbornly pro-South, pro-slavery bias is evident in the series' earlier novels. And second, Finley's depiction of the Ku Klux Klan is written for young readers before many books questioning Reconstruction had become popular for adult readers. Here, Harris explores Elsie's Motherhood and discusses as to how the novel is being adapted for modern readers.

Harris examines how both Heliodorus's \"Ethiopica\" and Pauline Hopkins's \"Of One Blood\" dealt with racial differences. Hopkins may not have set out to rewrite \"Ethiopica\" as an African-American romance, but there are parallels of plot and theme.

Harris reviews Chemical Crimes: Science and Poison in Victorian Crime Fiction by Cheryl Blake Price.

Harris reviews Race, Gender and Empire in American Detective Fiction by John Cullen Gruesser.

This dissertation examines the ways in which silence is figured within selected sentimental novels by women between 1761 and 1814. Through a series of close readings, I argue that women's silence in these texts is treated not as an absence but as a site of ambiguity and potential duplicity that challenges the authority of the male gaze. I offer personal and cultural reasons to explain why these professional, prolific women writers employ silence both as theme and narrative strategy. The introduction relates this concern with silence to wider political and philosophical efforts to stabilize language through a variety of late-eighteenth-century linguistic projects, which raise questions about who has the authority to speak and what can be said. I also discuss the disillusionment with language that shapes the sentimental novel as genre, as well as contemporary drama. Finally, I draw upon theories concerning women's relationship to language, presented by recent French and American feminist literary critics. In Chapter One, on Sheridan's epistolary tragedy The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761), I explore the contradictions within Sidney's self-description as silent martyr. Chapter Two examines women's use of language and money in Cecilia (1782), as part of Burney's larger critique of restrictive gender roles. Inchbald's A Simple Story (1791) and Nature and Art (1796), discussed in Chapter Three, both describe attempts to censor women, but Inchbald's marginalized women subvert the interpretive authority of men and the institutions that they represent. In Chapter Four, on Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1809), I argue that More subtly undermines the arrogant self-assurance of the male narrator, while redefining her heroine's invisibility and silence as godlike qualities, suggesting power and knowledge, rather that passive powerlessness. In Chapter Five I turn to Burney's final novel, The Wanderer (1814), in which both heroine and narrator manipulate silences in disconcerting ways. In my conclusion I consider the extent to which these texts, as they recognize the costs and the consolations of silence, both anticipate and critique the emerging Victorian ideology of the domesticated heroine.