Jane Augustine’s edited and annotated critical edition of The Gift has been an essential reference in H.D. studies since its initial release in 1998. Now, the University Press of Florida is releasing the paperback edition–perfect for teaching centered on H.D., on autobiography, and on “the gift” of artistic creativity.

“It is a special joy to have the complete text of The Gift, a stunning work in the H.D. canon, a work of import for studies in autobiography and the essay, for understanding the spiritual crisis of modernism, and as a climactic work in the career of an extraordinary 20th-century woman writer.”

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Temple University

Richard Vytniorgu of the University of Leicester positions H.D. as a thinker and reads her autobiographical prose and recently published work of the 1940s in conversation with literary theorist, Louise Rosenblatt. The book, The Butterfly Hatch (Sussex, 2019), takes H.D.’s recurring imagery of butterflies as a metaphor for exploring wisdom, consciousness, and experience.

The book is a brilliant and urgent call for new interventions in both the study and teaching of literature. Vytniorgu, whose indebtedness to the theory and practice of Louise Rosenblatt is everywhere evident, promises readers greater self-knowledge and enhanced understanding of some of the central existential issues of life. The book upends most established approaches to both the study and teaching of literature, especially those that remove the person from readings of texts and ignore crucial concepts such as wisdom. The Butterfly Hatch is an indispensible work, therefore, for educators, students, and nonprofessional readers interested in learning about themselves and the world from their encounters with literature.

Elizabeth A. Flynn, Professor Emerita, Michigan Tech University

Focused on H.D.’s late writing in The Sword Went out to Sea and Helen in Egypt, Lheisa Dustin takes a psychoanalytic approach to what she calls the “language of suffering.” Dustin’s book is Ghost Worlds and Invisible Giants: H.D., Djuna Barnes, and the Language of Suffering (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2021).

The book is available in hardback and ebook formats.

About the book:

“Lheisa Dustin draws on Lacanian theory, Buddhist thought and feminist scholarship to offer densely argued interpretations of work by H.D. and Djuna Barnes. Focusing particularly on the two women’s challenging use of language, Ghost Words and Invisible Giants acknowledges academic and spiritual sources while suggesting fresh ways of making sense of enigmatic linguistic tendencies and patterns. This study will be of particular interest to readers in literary modernism, spirituality and psychoanalytic theory.”
— Caroline Zilboorg, is the editor of Richard Aldington and H.D.: Their Lives in Letters and H.D.’s Bid Me to Live. Among her other books are Transgressions, a historical novel about H.D., and the two-volume Life of Gregory Zilboorg (Psyche, Psychology and Psychoanalysis and Mind, Medicine and Man)