LITERARY C RITIC ISM
LITERARY THEORY and C RITIC ISM
CRAFT CLASS The Writing Workshop in American Culture
STUDIES IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CULTURE
CHRISTOPHER KEMPF
Volume 51 The hidden history of the creative writing workshop and the socioeconomic consequences of the craft labor metaphor.
JOHN S HOPKI NS U NI VE R SIT Y PR E S S press.jhu.edu 3 8
In Craft Class, Christopher Kempf argues that the primary institutional form of creative writing studies, the workshop, has remained invisible before our scholarly eyes. While Baker and others marshalled craft toward economic critique, craft pedagogies consolidated the authority of elite educational institutions as the MFA industry grew. Transcoding professional-managerial soft skills in the language of manual labor, the workshop nostalgically invokes practices that the university itself has rendered obsolete. Delineating an arc that extends from Boston’s fin de siècle Society of Arts and Crafts through 1930s proletarian workshops to the pedagogies of Black Mountain College and the postwar MFA, Craft Class reveals how present-day creative writing restructures transhistorical questions of labor, education, and aesthetic and economic production. CHRISTOPHER KEMPF (CHAMPAIGN, IL) is a visiting assistant professor
in creative writing at the University of Illinois. MARCH 304 pages
6x9 18 b&w photos 978-1-4214-4356-0 $34.95 ( s) £26.00 pb 978-1-4214-4355-3 $99.95 (s) £74.00 hc Also available as an e-book
edited by DAVID A. BREWER and CRYSTAL B. LAKE
A selection of the most exciting current work in eighteenth-century studies. Focusing on the fraught ways in which communities are defined, volume 51 of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture showcases groundbreaking research in all of the disciplines that constitute eighteenth-century studies. An article by Aaron Santesso and David Rosen intervenes in the current debates over “critique” by excavating a theory of ethical reading embedded in liberalism. In a similar mode, Jesslyn Whittell reads Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno as a “stuplime” forerunner to contemporary experimental poetry. This volume of SECC also includes contributions from Li Qi Peh, Maximillian E. Novak, and Judith Stuchiner that explore Daniel Defoe’s thinking about individualism, community, and religious instruction. The volume concludes with a cluster of short essays responding to the methodological challenges posed by Daniel O’Quinn’s Engaging the Ottoman Empire. DAVID A. BREWER (COLUMBUS, OH) is an associ-
ate professor of English at The Ohio State University. CRYSTAL B. LAKE (DAYTON, OH) is a professor
of English language and literatures at Wright State University. She is the author of Artifacts: How We Think and Write about Found Objects. MAY 352 pages
6x9 15 b&w illus. 978-1-4214-4342-3 $50.00 ( s) £37.00 hc
