Detailed Description
To celebrate twenty years of Trent Editions we are offering a discounted bundle of our American titles. In this collection we have:
Poet: A Lying Word by Laura Riding, with a critical introduction by Jack Blackmore
Laura Riding is a major experimental interwar poet who first discovered and championed the writing of Gertrude Stein and whose work has strongly influenced others as diverse as Robert Graves, W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and John Ashbery. Poet: A Lying Word, her penultimate collection of poems, was composed during 1930 and 1933 in the most settled period of her poetic career, during her astonishingly productive partnership with Robert Graves in Majorca. Poet: A Lying Word represents both the main crisis in and the climax to Riding’s poetic career, a period in which she threw her all into the crucible of poetry. The result was the most original, and in important ways the finest, collection of poems of the twentieth century.
Hawthorne (1999) by Henry James, with a critical introduction by Kate Fullbrook
Hawthorne is an intriguing commentary by one major writer on another. Attacked in its own time for stressing the provinciality of American culture, Henry James’s biography on Nathaniel Hawthorne reveals a fascinating insight into his own literary and cultural self and his attempts at aesthetic differentiation illuminate the anxieties of late American modernism. Hawthorne speaks tellingly, and ironically, of the self-conscious development of American and modern culture.
Our Nig (1998) by Harriet E. Wilson, with a critical introduction by Professor R.J. Ellis
First published in Boston in 1859, Our Nig, or, Sketches form the Life of a Free Black offers a harrowing portrait of the sadistic maltreatment of Alfrado, a young female African American bond servant. It shows how racism can infect the whole body politic and how enslavement can exist not just as a legally defined institution but also as an apparatus of social practices and norms, even in a slave-free State, namely Massachusetts. The novel thus shows how slavery can indeed exist in ‘freedom’.
Our Nig is a milestone in African American writing. It stands as the first published novel to be written by an African American woman and the first African American novel to be published in the USA. Limited in its circulation, Our Nig remained hardly noticed until brought back to the public’s attention in 1983, when Henry Louis Gates Jr. released a facsimile edition. Only then did it start to receive the acclaim it deserved. This is the first modern edition to be published.
A great collection for readers interested in America’s rich and eclectic literary past.
