Scholarly Achievement
In addition to its accomplishments in the fields of American History, Southern Studies, African American Studies, and Women's Studies, the Press has also published seminal and authoritative works in other academic disciplines, including Musicology, Classics, and Literary Criticism.
The ClassicsClassicists consider D. R. Shackleton Bailey the greatest living expositor of the writings of Cicero and one of the most distinguished Latinists of the twentieth century. His translation of the Philippics (1986) is the standard English scholarly edition of the great Roman orator's most mature works.
Literary Criticism
The Press has always had a strong list in literary criticism,
ranging from early classics by Norman Grabo and Cleanth Brooks to source
studies on North Carolina's Thomas Wolfe.
Cleanth Brooks' classic, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939), was the first critical study to integrate modern poetry into the history of poetic development as a whole. Brooks argued the revolutionary thesis that English poetry and poetic theory had been deflected from their richest line of development by the scientific rationalism of Hobbes and that only with the advent of modernist poets like Yeats and Elliot was a connection to an earlier and richer tradition re-established.
One facet of the Press's regional publishing program has been scholarship on North Carolina's favorite novelist, Thomas Wolfe. In The Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe (1970) editors Richard S. Kennedy and Paschal Reeves balance the demand for accuracy and completeness with the need to edit Wolfe's voluminous and often random notations into something useful to the scholar. Because they reveal much about the mind and workings of the author, The Notebooks are an essential source for Wolfe scholars.
History of Music
The Press has published a small but impressive list in the history
of music. Two books in particular, both by professors in the University of
North Carolina's Music Department, are considered to be the definitive
studies of their respective genres. When it appeared, William S. Newman's
three-volume History of the Sonata Idea (1959, 1963, 1969) filled a
gap in modern music literature, for despite its continued popularity as a
compositional form, the sonata had never received a comprehensive
historical treatment. Newman focuses on how the sonata has been defined
and variously interpreted by composers from its appearance as an
instrumental title in the sixteenth century to World War I.
Howard Smither's three-volume A History of the Oratorio (1977, 1987) treats first the oratorio's social context, particularly the circumstances of its performance, then the libretto, and finally the music. It is the first full-length study of the genre since 1911 and the first one to appear in the English language. In 1978, Volumes I and II won the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) Deems Taylor Award.
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