Product Code: H903
ISBN: 9780881465280
Price: $35.00
In the fifty years since her death, Flannery O’Connor studies have been conventionally delimited to two critical parameters: the South and the Church of Rome. This work challenges the conception of O’Connor as inherent to a monolithic South and to orthodox Roman Catholicism by problematizing the “Southern Gothic” trope, positing a non-canonical Southern realism, and repositioning O’Connor as essentially ecumenical in her private theology. The study contextualizes O’Connor’s work within the American scene by detailing the varied political and literary histories of the “North” and “South” as well as opposing the notion of region-specific aesthetics and a native anti-realist mode in the South.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H874
ISBN: 9780881464528
Product Format: Hardback
Price: $16.00
Like his father and grandfather before him, Fergus Greybar the Fourth travels the countryside in a wagon of carnival mirrors, pulled by two magnificent white horses named Look and See. As the Mirror Man, he is welcomed everywhere by children who find delight in seeing themselves take on strange and funny shapes when looking into the six mirrors that line the inside of his wagon. But there is another mirror, one of great magic—the Seventh Mirror. In it, children see themselves not as they are, but as they wish to be.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P549
ISBN: 9780881466256
Price: $17.00
In the story of the earth, geologists tell us that around 12,000 years ago the planet shifted from the Pleistocene to the Holocene. There probably were poets to sing about that change, but of what they sang, we have no records. Even earlier, paintings on cave walls point toward an artistic response from our upstart species. These early artists painted the Pleistocene’s last great ice age herds thundering past. Now John Lane’s traveling geologist sings a dawning epoch’s blues. The Anthropocene is upon us, and his poems show how humans believe they have become “the planet’s boss, the big chief, the emperor of air, diesel fuel,/bow thrusters, and tax shelters…”
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P572
ISBN: 9780881466751
Price: $16.00
Over the past few decades, the gulf coast of Louisiana has suffered its share of natural disasters. From hurricanes, to floods, to the gradual destruction caused by coastal erosion, the poems in NO BROTHER, THIS STORM serve as archives of the hope and resilience found throughout the region.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H984
ISBN: 9780881467406
Price: $35.00
Flannery O'Connor is unique in that she is not only familiar with seventeenth-century emblematic representations of scriptural truth, but she is also knowledgeable of the conventions of twentieth-century art forms. Her characters are illuminated by textual images formulated from the juxtaposition of scripture, seventeenth- and twentieth-century archetypes, and street detritus that inhabits pictorial sequences exceeding the boundaries of time and diachronically upending O'Connor's narrative world.
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Product Code: H896
ISBN: 9780881464917
Price: $24.00
Perhaps it was a sense of estrangement from the everyday that drew Cynthia Sorrel to the village of Cooper Patent. The failed painter was lured by the gatehouse with its seven doors, the lake with its tower, and the magical air of a place that couldn't quite decide whether it was fictional, mythic, or real. The gatehouse should have been a first clue that she was on a journey, and soon she begins to glimpse and then to pursue a figure in the woods near her house, convinced she has seen the Muse.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P515
ISBN: 9780881465419
Price: $35.00
What does it mean to become a human being? This question was persistently repeated by Kierkegaard scholar Howard V. Hong (1912–2010) to students during his forty-year tenure at St. Olaf College. As one of Dr. Hong’s students, Jamie Lorentzen never forgot the question—one that always pointed to the ethical upbuilding of individuals.
Lorentzen’s Kierkegaard studies inform commentary on how central characters in four works of literature help readers answer Howard Hong’s question.
Twain’s Huck Finn becomes human by being an unwitting ethicist despite himself and the pro-slavery culture in which he was reared. Ishmael and Queequeg’s embrace of the neighbor and outcast in Melville’s Moby-Dick is an ethical counterpoint to Ahab’s terrifying narcissism. Meanwhile, Ibsen’s famous narcissist, Peer Gynt, offers an archetypal negative ethical model for becoming human. Finally, Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima and Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov show how ethics informs human development in both secular and religious cultures.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P562
ISBN: 9780881466539
Price: $16.00
SPECTER MOUNTAIN is a book-length poetry collaboration between Jesse Graves and William Wright that imagines the spiritual and ecological life of an embattled landscape. The collection fuses two striking poetic visions into a cohesive and innovative new perspective on nature and the inevitable imprint of human interaction with wilderness. Readers will gain a sense of the permanent beauty of rivers and mountains, timeless images of the sublime, and the grandeur that reaches beyond human life and influence.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P568
ISBN: 9780881466607
Price: $24.00
WHEN IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVENTS includes eight essays that were first presented at the 2016 A.V. Elliott Conference on Great Books and Ideas, the ninth annual conference sponsored by Mercer University's Thomas C. and Ramona E. McDonald Center for America's Founding Principles. 1776 was a momentous year. Contributors include W.B. Allen, Jane E. Calvert, Adam Potkay, Dennis C. Rasmussen, James H. Read, Diana Schaub, Scott Philip Segrest, and Brian Steele.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P477
ISBN: 9780881464658
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $18.00
The poems in DECEMBERS have been written, usually one a year, beginning in 1973 when the author moved from the South to New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, where he took a job teaching creative writing at Westminster College. They are written to accompany the Christmas cards he and his wife Jane write each year to keep in touch with friends from college, graduate school, and earlier jobs.
These poems arise out of memory, both of the author and those of others. In them Perkins is much more interested in the images of the season, the sights, the sounds, the scents, the textures, and the tastes than he is in the abstractions: joy, love, warmth, gratitude, etc. He is more interested in what the season is than in what it means.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P503
ISBN: 9780881465235
Price: $18.00
Moving and filled with unexpected ideas and imagery, The Color of All Things is a love letter from one man to one woman, but it offers love from each of us to all of us. Brimming with a touching and generous joy, this is a book of everyday needs that can only be filled with a genuine and lasting love. This is the third volume of poetry from Philip Lee Williams, following on his Elegies for the Water and his national book of the year (Books and Culture magazine) The Flower Seeker: An Epic Poem of William Bartram. Like his other volumes of poetry, The Color of All Things moves slowly through the natural world without sentimentality but with surefooted grace and lovely rhythms. Georgia poet laureate Judson Mitcham says that in Williams’s poetry we hear “the distinctive voice of a poet who knows how to tell the stories that matter, how to hold still and take a good look at the natural world and let himself be filled with praise, a poet who knows how to find the right prayer and how to pray it.”
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P414
ISBN: 9780881462210
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $25.00
The Flower Seeker is an epic poem that follows the young William Bartram on his journey in the American South and during his old age in his father’s gardens. It is truly a southern Odyssey, using techniques of fiction and poetry to get deeply inside one of the most remarkable men ever to strap on a pair of boots in America.
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