One of America's most celebrated women, Emily Dickinson was virtually unpublished in her own time and unknown to the public at large. Today her poetry is commonly anthologized and widely praised for its precision, its intensity, its depth and beauty. Dickinson's life and work, however, remain in important ways mysterious. This collection of essays, all of them previously unpublished, represent the best of contemporary scholarship and points the way toward exciting new directions for the future.

Beowulf is the oldest and most complete epic poem in any non-Classical European language. This impressive volume selects over one hundred works of critical commentary from the vast body of scholarship on Beowulf - including English translations from German, Danish, Latin and Spanish - from the poem's first mention in 1705 to the Anglophone scholarship of the early twentieth century. Tom Shippey provides both a contextual introduction and a guide to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship which generated these Beowulf commentaries.

A Companion to the Vietnam War contains twenty-four definitive essays on America's longest and most divisive foreign conflict. It represents the best current scholarship on this controversial and influential episode in modern American history.

- Highlights issues of nationalism, culture, gender, and race.

- Covers the breadth of Vietnam War history, including American war policies, the Vietnamese perspective, the antiwar movement, and the American home front.

- Surveys and evaluates the best scholarship on every important era and topic.

For nearly half a century, Professor M.A.K Halliday has been enriching the discipline of linguistics with his keen insight into this social semiotic phenomenon we call language. His scholarship has advanced our understanding of language as an activity which is both rational and relational, systemic and semantic, dynamic and diverse. Building on the legacy of his mentor, Professor J.R. Firth, Halliday approaches language from the vantage point of meaning and purpose, and provides a sound theoretical framework for dealing with questions about how and why we come to use language as we do for being and becoming who we are.

Halliday's work has long attracted a wide audience, which includes linguists, educators, computer scientists and policy makers. What many find appealing in the man and his scholarship is his rejection, on the one hand, of the elitism typical of certain other schools of linguistics, while on the other hand embracing the study of that which powers language and also conditions our ways of thinking and behaving.