20% off until October 17th! Hardcover: regularly $119.00, on sale for $96.00, 4-6 week delivery. ebook: regularly $89.00, on sale for $53.00, direct from author $35.00! 48 hour delivery in .pdf format. David Bowie and Romanticism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) studies the life and work of David Bowie against the background of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and literature. The book is hardcover with library binding and acid resistant paper. Shipping included. HARDCOVER ORDER HERE. ISBN: 978-3-030-97622-4

20% off until October 17th! Hardcover: regularly $119.00, on sale for $96.00, 4-6 week delivery. ebook: regularly $89.00, on sale for $53.00, direct from author $35.00! 48 hour delivery in .pdf format. David Bowie and Romanticism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) studies the life and work of David Bowie against the background of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and literature. The book is hardcover with library binding and acid resistant paper. Shipping included. HARDCOVER ORDER HERE. ISBN: 978-3-030-97622-4

Writing for College and Beyond (Lulu, 2019) is a new kind of first-year writing text, one that emphasizes the connections between the writing students do in typical English composition classes and their future business and professional careers. It covers writing commonly taught in first year writing courses such as summary, synthesis, analysis, and argument writing as well as MLA and APA documentation styles. It’s also fully customizable for departmental or group orders. Shipping included in price for individual copies. ISBN: 978-1483499048

James Rovira’s Reading as Democracy in Crisis: Interpretation, Theory, History (Lexington Books, 2019) examines major literary theorists and philosophers from Plato to the twenty-first century against their historical backgrounds to demonstrate how historical forces influence the interpretation of texts. The books is in a library binding with archival paper. Shipping included. ISBN: 978-1-4985-5386-5

Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth and Rock from Dylan to U2 (Lexington Books, 2018) examines rock, folk, blues, post-punk, grunge, and other musical forms by bands such as Bob Dylan, the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Martha Redbone, Leonard Cohen, Jackson Browne, Rush, Nirvana, Blackberry Smoke against art of poetry of eighteenth- and nineteeth-century figures William Blake and William Wordsworth. The book ships in hardcover in library binding and acid resistant paper. It is also available as an ebook or in trade paper. Please contact the author at jamesrovira@gmail.com if you would like a copy in other formats. Shipping included in price. ISBN: 978-1-4985-5383-4

Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) explores the relationships among the musical genres of post-punk, goth, and metal and American and European Romanticisms traditionally understood. It argues that these contemporary forms of music are not only influenced by but are an expression of Romanticism continuous with their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century influences. Figures such as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Friedrich, Schlegel, and Hoffman are brought alongside the music and visual aesthetics of the Rolling Stones, the New Romantics, the Pretenders, Joy Division, Nick Cave, Tom Verlaine, emo, Eminem, My Dying Bride, and Norwegian black metal to explore the ways that Romanticism continues into the present in all of its varying forms and expressions. The book is available as an ebook, in trade paper, and in hardcover (hardcover priced below). The hardcover edition is in library binding with archival paper. If you would like to order the book in other formats, please contact the author at jamesrovira@gmail.com for pricing. Shipping included. ISBN: 978-3-319-72688-5

Price below is for the ebook. The book is available in trade paper and in hardcover with library binding and archival paper for different prices. Contact the author at jamesrovira@gmail.com if you wish to order a print copy of this book. Shipping included. Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety (Continuum, 2010) exploring the origins of the continually popular Frankenstein myth — one in which a human being, though the agency of science, creates an independently thinking and feeling being. It compares William Blake’s and Søren Kierkegaard’s models of personality for the purpose of asking the question, “Why do we fear what we create?”, arguing that Creation Anxiety in the work of William Blake, especially as evident in The [First] Book of Urizen and The Four Zoas, arises from the displacement of classical models of personality (as conceived by Socrates and received through the Medieval era) by Enlightenment models. We fear what we create because we are recreating ourselves into we know not what. Because Kierkegaard shares Blake’s concerns about the predominance of Enlightenment models of personality, and because he lived in a culture similar to Blake’s characterized by tensions between monarchy and democracy, science and religion, and nature and artifice, his concept of anxiety is apropos to understanding the variety of anxieties characterizing Blake’s work. Major works discussed in this monograph include Blake’s The [First] Book of Urizen, The Four Zoas, selections from The Songs of Innocence and of Experience (particularly the Introduction to Innocence and “To Tirzah”), and Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety, Either/Or I and II, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and The Sickness Unto Death. This work can be cross-listed in Literature, Philosophy, Religion, British History, Danish History, Theology, and Psychology. Reviews and Endorsements “Blake and Kierkegaard speak from the same instinct of the human condition and of man’s states of anxiety and self-awareness. James Rovira offers a highly nuanced comparative reading of both author’s concepts, of innocence and experience, creation and fall, that not only enhances our understanding of the works under consideration but affirms their abiding and life-affirming relevance to modern thought.” –Michael Phillips, Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York, UK “Rovira’s book is an involved but extremely rewarding book, one that delves fully into the complex and sophisticated dialectical processes involved in Kierkegaard’s thought… Blake and Kierkegaard as a whole is a carefully thought-through and argued text.’ zoamorp.hosis.com ‘Rovira’s comparative study of William Blake and Soren Kierkegaard offers fresh perspectives related to both thinkers in their shared sociocultural moment. Rovira (English, Tiffin Univ.) frames his inquiry within creation anxiety–i.e., the persistent idea that creations will ultimately turn against one in destructive ways. The author makes connections between Frankenstein, Metropolis, and the Matrix trilogy in order to justify the persistence of this anxiety through the last 200 years and to imply that the apprehensions that impacted Blake’s and Kierkegaard’s thinking–apprehensions resulting from tensions between democracy and monarchy, science and religion, nature and artifice–apply today. Rovira compares and contrasts ideas relating to the progressive development of the subject to show how both resisted mechanistic Enlightenment psychologies that led to creation anxiety: in Blake’s case, from innocence through experience toward visionary perspectives; in Kierkegaard’s, the differentiation of self from natural, social, and mental environment. Accessible yet provocative, this book makes a significant contribution and offers critical challenges to the scholarship surrounding both figures, and close readings (and re-readings) expose lingering tensions between self and subjectivity. Generous notes and a substantial comprehensive bibliography round out this excellent study. Summing Up: Essential Lower-division undergraduates and above.” — J.A. Saklofske, Acadia University, Nova Scotia, Canada, Choice. ‘Rovira’s book is an involved but extremely rewarding book, one that delves fully into the complex and sophisticated dialectical processes involved in Kierkegaard’s thought… Blake and Kierkegaard as a whole is a carefully thought-through and argued text.” — Jason Whittaker, University College Falmouth, Cornwall, Zoamorphosis. “In Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety, Rovira shows much skill in handling both writers on the basis of the comparative premises he sets up.” — Robert Rix, University of Aalborg, Denmark, Comparative Literature Studies. Rovira’s book offers a fresh possibility of viewing each writer through the lens of the other in a number of tantalizing suggestions, such as through the relationship between generation and creation. Rovira’s observation that the creator figure in Blake’s The Four Zoas is Enion rather than Urizen, for instance, has intriguing implications for the earlier section on Thel and Oothoon (113). In this regard, the book contributes to a rethinking of the boundaries of theory, particularly as they need to be addressed vis-à-vis the field of European and British romanticism.” — Kathryn Freeman, Miami University, Ohio, Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly. ISBN: 9781441135599