West Virginia University Press has announced the release of two new publications. Both titles engage with higher education, one through a carefully documented history and the other through experimental fiction.
In “The Madison Women: Gender, Higher Education, and Literacy in 19th Century Appalachia," Amanda E. Hayes examines the history of higher education in Appalachia through the lens of female students at Madison College, a rural 19th century institution.
The book delivers a history that contradicts the stereotype of the region as hostile to education, highlighting colleges that proliferated the area in the 19th century. Many of these colleges were either coeducational or even specifically for women, ultimately contradicting another stereotype — that Appalachia is a region particularly hostile toward women.
Hayes, who teaches English and composition at Kent State University-Tuscarawas and was raised on a family farm in Appalachian Ohio, incorporates mini-biographies of women who attended Madison College and who went on to change their communities in various ways.
In “Enclosure Architect,” novelist Douglas W. Milliken paints a complicated picture of life after college when a partisan rift destroys the university and civil conflict erupts in an unnamed American city.
The book follows indigent queer sculptor Margaux, described by Kirkus Reviews as a “wryly comic observer,” as she details the culmination and ultimate dissolution of her chosen family of artists, bohemians and libertines amid the chaotic urban backdrop. What first seems like a form of liberation, when every student’s personal records, from transcripts to debts, are consumed in fire, becomes a burden as Margaux encounters the breakdowns, disappearances and deaths of the people she admires and cherishes most.
This novel explores, in a nonlinear narrative structure, multiple facets of the recent decades of constant civil unrest, with a particular focus on the complicated nature of holding a personal creative life amid a time of constant violence and change.
The books are available for purchase from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online retailers.