First book of essays devoted to Coetzee's controversial novel, combining critical and pedagogical approaches. Ever since it was first published in 1999, Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace has provoked controversy. Set in post-apartheid South Africa, it follows Prof. David Lurie as he encounters disgrace through his sexual exploitation of a student and then through the shocking gang-rape of his only daughter. The novel's uncompromising portrayal of the "new" South Africa outraged many, who found the book regressive, even racist. It also challengedreaders worldwide to confront its hard questions. This first book of essays devoted to the novel ambitiously brings together criticism and pedagogy. The ten critical essays and eight essays on teaching Disgrace grapple with the ethical issues the novel so provocatively raises: rape, gender, race, animal rights. Disgrace is widely taught in colleges and universities and read in book clubs; the debates it has given rise to will take on fresh life with the release of the upcoming film starring John Malkovich. Unusually, the eighteen contributors to the collection are all faculty members or graduates of the same institution, the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies atthe University of Redlands, and have worked together closely in crafting their essays over the past two years. The volume will be exceptionally useful to teachers of literature, philosophy, and South African culture, to book clubleaders, and to all readers of Coetzee. Contributors: Nancy Best, James Boobar, Bradley Butterfield, Jane Creighton, Matthew Gray, Pat Harrigan, Gary Hawkins, Rabbi Patricia Karlin-Neumann, Daniel Kiefer, Bill McDonald, Michael G. McDunnah, Kim Middleton, Kevin O'Neill, Raymond Obstfeld, Kathy Ogren, Kenneth Reinhard, Sandra D. Shattuck, Patricia Casey Sutcliffe, Julie Townsend. Bill McDonald is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Redlands, Redlands, California.

Two births, two tragedies. A family battered but resilient and searching for the answers they need to bring them solace and help them heal. When the birth of their first baby goes devastatingly wrong, Jessamy and Luke's grief is complicated by the perceived guilt they each carry. Meaningful communication between them is lost and their marriage deteriorates. A memorial service provides the opening needed for the couple to be honest with each other. Secrets are revealed and love rediscovered, but when the one thing Luke hoped for above all else becomes a reality, their joy is short-lived. It brings a new complication that threatens to destroy their fragile marriage. Birth, death, forgiveness, and acceptance are the warp and weave of Jessamy and Luke's story. But most of all, Absent Children is about love - the love between a man and a woman, and the love of parents for their children, present and absent.

Whether in the pages of a trashy novel, under the glow of gaslights, in a dance hall, or on the walls of art galleries, the figure of the female dancer haunts nineteenth-century French culture. Artists and writers of all kinds took on la danseuse as an emblem of their own artistic prowess. They represented her alternately as an elusive ideal, a saucy prostitute, or a dangerous seductress. Dancers, in turn, produced their own images, novels and autobiographies, thereby contributing to an ongoing cultural debate around performance, spectatorship, desire, and art. In this interdisciplinary study of la danseuse, Julie Townsend examines the rise and fall of classical ballet, the phenomenon of the music hall, and the birth of modern dance. She highlights moments of representational crisis and emergent aesthetics in her consideration of poetry, novels, painting, early film, and women's autobiography.