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New Titles at the UConn Library Avery Point

New Titles December 2024

Spotlight

Below is a short selection of new eBooks from other UConn Library collections that support the information/research needs of UConn Avery Point.

You can find other eBooks by navigating to the UConn Library search page, clicking the drop down menu that reads "Articles and Library Catalog" (next to the microphone and magnifying glass icon), and then selecting "E-Books". When you search your preferred topic, each result will be an eBook.

Spotlight Gallery - December 2024

The Gender Binary and the Invention of Race

The Gender Binary and the Invention of Race explores a fundamental and often overlooked connection between modern European classifications of sex/gender and those of race. Starting in the eighteenth century, these classifications have been co-constructed through a White, sex/gender-binary ideal for the male-female couple; an ideal that so-called "inferior races" were thought not to meet. Through an exploration of expressions of this racial sex/gender-binary ideal, this book will broaden the reader's understanding of how thoroughly enmeshed categories of race, sex/gender, and sexuality are, as well how the racial gender-binary ideal has structured dominant understandings of race and sex/gender categories in a way that supports multiple social hierarchies. It also demonstrates how the racial gender-binary ideal has shaped arguments for the respectability of fin de siècle male homosexuality, as well as Simone de Beauvoir's classic text, The Second Sex. In addition, the book compares the approach it takes to understanding the relationship between sex/gender and racial categories and oppressions to the intersectional approach associated with Kimberlé Crenshaw. The Gender Binary and the Invention of Race is an accessibly written book of interest to those studying in both undergraduate and graduate Gender Studies classes, especially those focused on the relationship between categories of gender and race, as well as a more general audience with a background or interest in Gender Studies

In Ascension

An astonishing novel about a young microbiologist investigating an unfathomable deep vent in the ocean floor, leading her on a journey that will encompass the full trajectory of the cosmos and the passage of a single human life. Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, traveling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic Ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of Earth's first life forms--what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings. Her discovery leads Leigh to the Mojave Desert and an ambitious new space agency. Drawn deeper into the agency's work, she learns that the Atlantic trench is only one of several related phenomena from across the world, each piece linking up to suggest a pattern beyond human understanding. Leigh knows that to continue working with the agency will mean leaving behind her declining mother and her younger sister, and faces an impossible choice: to remain with her family, or to embark on a journey across the breadth of the cosmos. Exploring and celebrating the natural world with wonder and reverence, In Ascension is a compassionate, deeply inquisitive epic that reaches outward to confront the greatest questions of existence, looks inward to illuminate the smallest details of the human heart, and shows how--no matter how far away we might be and how much we have lost hope--we will always attempt to return to the people and places we call home.

Hope and Kinship in Contemporary Fiction: Moods and Modes of Temporality and Belonging

Explores the emphasis that contemporary novels, films and television series place on the present, arguing that hope emerges from the potentiality of the here and now, rather than the future, and as intimately entangled with negotiations of structures of belonging. Taking its cue from an understanding of hope as connoting an organizing temporality, one which is often presumed to be projecting into a future, Hope and Kinship in Contemporary Fiction challenges this understanding, arguing that hope emerges in practices of relationality in the present, disentangling hope from a necessary correlation with futurity. Through close readings of contemporary works, including The RoadThe Walking DeadCloud AtlasSense8, The People in the Trees and A Little Life, Gero Bauer investigates how these texts explore structures of kinship as creative and affective practices of belonging and care that claim spaces beyond the heterosexual, reproductive nuclear family. In this context, fictional figurations of the child - often considered the bearer of the future - are of particular interest. Through these interventions into definitions of and reflections on fictional manifestations of hope and kinship, Bauer's analyses intersect with queer theory, new materialism and postcritical approaches to literature and cultural studies, moving towards counterintuitively hopeful readings of the present moment.