Gilmore, Irr have forthcoming books

Professors Michael T. Gilmore and Caren Irr have forthcoming books.

Gilmore's book, The War on Words: Slavery, Race and Free Speech in American Literature, is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press. This book focuses on how the great traumas of the nineteenth century, slavery and racial equality, acted as a check on free expression in both American romanticism and realism.

Irr's forthcoming book from University of Iowa Press, Pink Pirates: Contemporary American Women Writers and Copyright, asks how recent writings by women have responded to the tightening of copyright rules in the US.  Examining controversies over the ownership of children's literature, fashion designs, pornography, and song lyrics, Irr shows how gender registers in copyright cases.  She then turns to novels by Ursula Le Guin, Andrea Barrett, Kathy Acker and Leslie Marmon Silko to show how some writers have recovered a positive vision of the commons, setting this utopian creativity against the more restrictive economy of property rights.