Spirits of the Dead examines the importance attached to preserving the memory of the dead in the Roman world, and explores the ways in which funerary inscriptions can be used to reconstruct Roman lives, however fragmentarily and imperfectly. It is the only study to examine epigraphic, historical, and archaeological evidence in order to gain insight into the way Romans used funerary texts to establish a dialogue with their own society. Maureen Carroll brings together a large body of material from many geographical areas, shedding light on provincial and regional variation in funerary commemoration and even on the differences between funerary traditions of neighbouring towns.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Before World War I, Southern women's participation in the workforce consisted of black women's domestic labor and white working-class women's industrial or manufacturing work, but after the war, Southern women flooded business offices as stenographers, typists, clerks, and bookkeepers. This book examines their experiences in the clerical workforce, using both traditional labor sources and exploring the cultural institutions that evolved from these women's work-related milieu.
Businessmen throughout the South molded this workforce to meet their needs using both labor-saving management techniques and exploiting social mores to enforce gender boundaries that limited women's workplace opportunities. This study traces the social and economic implications of Southern women's increased participation in clerical labor after World War I. While it increased the civic activities of white middle-class southern women, it also confined them to a routinized days work and limited venues of occupational achievement. Through a varied network of business women's clubs and organizations, women struggled with their new identities as workers and attempted to integrate their work lives with their community and family obligations.
(Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1995; revised with new Introduction and Preface)

In collections such as Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver wrote with unflinching exactness about men and women enduring lives on the knife-edge of poverty and other deprivations. Beneath his pared-down surfaces run disturbing, violent undercurrents. Suggestive rather than explicit, and seeming all the more powerful for what is left unsaid, Carver's stories were held up as exemplars of a new school in American fiction known as minimalism or "dirty realism," a movement whose wide influence continues to this day. Carver's stories were brilliant in their detachment and use of the oblique, ambiguous gesture, yet there were signs of a different sort of sensibility at work. In books such as Cathedral and the later tales included in the collected stories volume Where I'm Calling From, Carver revealed himself to be a more expansive writer than in the earlier published books, displaying Chekhovian sympathies toward his characters and relying less on elliptical effects. In gathering all of Carver's stories, including early sketches and posthumously discovered works, The Library of America's Collected Stories provides a comprehensive overview of Carver's career as we have come to know it: the promise of Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and the breakthrough of What We Talk About, on through the departures taken in Cathedral and the pathos of the late stories. But it also prompts a fresh consideration of Carver by presenting Beginners, an edition of the manuscript of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love that Carver submitted to Gordon Lish, his editor and a crucial influence on his development. Lish's editing was so extensive that at one point Carver wrote him an anguished letter asking him not to publish the book; now, for the first time, readers can read both the manuscript and published versions of the collection that established Carver as a major American writer. Offering a fascinating window into the complex, fraught relation between writer and editor, Beginners expands our sense of Carver and is essential reading for anyone who cares about his achievement. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Spirits of the Dead examines the importance attached to preserving the memory of the dead in the Roman world, and explores the ways in which funerary inscriptions can be used to reconstruct Roman lives, however fragmentarily and imperfectly. It is the only study to examine epigraphic, historical, and archaeological evidence in order to gain insight into the way Romans used funerary texts to establish a dialogue with their own society. Maureen Carroll brings together a large body of material from many geographical areas, shedding light on provincial and regional variation in funerary commemoration and even on the differences between funerary traditions of neighbouring towns.

Despite the developing emphasis in current scholarship on children in Roman culture, there has been relatively little research to date on the role and significance of the youngest children within the family and in society. This volume singles out this youngest age group, the under one-year-olds, in the first comprehensive study of infancy and earliest childhood to encompass the Roman Empire as a whole: integrating social and cultural history with archaeological evidence, funerary remains, material culture, and the iconography of infancy, it explores how the very particular historical circumstances into which Roman children were born affected their lives as well as prevailing attitudes towards them. Examination of these varied strands of evidence, drawn from throughout the Roman world from the fourth century BC to the third century AD, allows the rhetoric about earliest childhood in Roman texts to be more broadly contextualized and reveals the socio-cultural developments that took place in parent-child relationships over this period. Presenting a fresh perspective on archaeological and historical debates, the volume refutes the notion that high infant mortality conditioned Roman parents not to engage in the early life of their children or to view them, or their deaths, with indifference, and concludes that even within the first weeks and months of life Roman children were invested with social and gendered identities and were perceived as having both personhood and value within society.