Blind Love
By Wilkie Collins
Edited by Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox
Broadvew Literary Texts

Poor Wilkie Collins. So celebrated during his life (1824-1889) that he rivaled Charles Dickens as the most famous living Victorian novelist, and forgotten so quickly after his death. Whereas Dickens’ name lives on through classics such as Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities and many others, Collins, the “Victorian bad boy” and father of the detective novel, all but vanished from the public consciousness for much of the 20th century.

But no more. Maria Bachman, assistant professor of English and co- director of the Honors Program at Coastal, has made major contributions to the resurgence of interest in Wilkie Collins in the literary world, and she has two published books as evidence. A third is on the way.

Reality’s Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins, a collection of critical essays by other scholars, came out in the fall of 2003. The anthology’s 13 articles call attention to Collins’ audaciously non-Victorian choice of topics and beg for a reevaluation of his literary legacy.

“It was an era when everyone was so focused on respectability, yet Collins insisted on writing about all the taboo subjects—divorce, people with disabilities, adultery, bigamy,” says Bachman, who worked on the book with a colleague, Don Richard Cox, English professor and associate dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tennessee.

“His popularity rivaled Dickens, but then he fell into obscurity.” Seen as a radical, especially in his later works, Collins had an artistic vision of realism that focused on darker truths than polite English society wanted to acknowledge. “He pushed the envelope in terms of Victorian morals,” Bachman says, both in his writings and his own life (he lived with two mistresses he never married).

This scholarly edition of Blind Love, designed for use in undergraduate and graduate classrooms, was drawn from Collins’ original manuscripts, says Bachman. The new edition, published in the spring of 2004, has restored cuts that had been made as a result of the 19th-century fad of serializing novels in popular periodicals. The book includes a critical introduction and primary source materials that address the novel’s focus on movements for Irish independence.
Appendices include newspaper accounts of Ireland during the Land War and of the fraud case on which Collins based his story, articles reacting to Collins’ sudden death, Punch cartoons depicting English attitudes toward the Irish, and contemporary reviews.

Bachman, who teaches courses on 19th-century British literature, is currently working with Cox on a scholarly edition of Collins’ The Woman in White, arguably his most popular and most accessible work.

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Supervision Today:
the Ultimate Guide to Front-line Management
By David DeCenzo and Stephen R. Robbins
Prentice Hall

New editions of two top-rated management textbooks co-authored by David A. DeCenzo, dean of Coastal Carolina University’s E. Craig Wall Sr. College of Business Administration, have been published.

Fundamentals of Management: Essential Concepts and Applications and
Supervision Today: the Ultimate Guide to Front-line Management, both co-written by DeCenzo and Stephen R. Robbins of San Deigo State University, have dominated the market for undergraduate-level management textbooks since they were first introduced in 1995.

The books, which have been translated in several languages, are used in hundreds of colleges and universities worldwide. They have been widely praised for their readable, skills-oriented text and their emphasis on contemporary, real-world applications. Departing from traditional textbook methods, the authors set out to create a new approach to teaching management, minimizing theory and providing abundant examples from active corporations to illustrate their subject matter.

“We decided it was time to consider the audience the book is intended for—the student,” said DeCenzo, who has written or co-written a total of 21 books on various aspects of business administration.

Before DeCenzo joined Coastal in 2002, he served as director of partnership development in the College of Business and Economics at Towson University in Maryland. He is an experienced industry consultant, corporate trainer and public speaker and has served a wide variety of clients including Citicorp Global Technology, Inc., Moen, Inc., Motorola, Inc., and others. 

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Although early American literature is his steady gig, Coastal English professor Steve Hamelman is best known outside the classroom for his avocation. A voracious enthusiast of music, particularly rock, Hamelman is the drummer of the faculty band, Virtue Trap, which plays in area taverns on weekends.

In recent years, he has also found a scholarly outlet for his intense absorption in rock music by writing articles for and participating in conferences devoted to pop culture. According to Hamelman, interdisciplinary-based studies on outside-the-canon subjects are replacing deconstructionist theory as the “new zeitgeist” of the literary-academic world, and pop culture is a hot topic. A couple of years back, he was encouraged by fellow Coastal English professor Dan Ennis (also of Virtue Trap) to expand a 10-page conference paper into a full-length book.

Published in April 2004 by the University of Georgia Press, But Is It Garbage? explores the relationship between rock music and various definitions of “trash.” A major theme is how rock reflects our modern consumer culture and its emphasis on “disposability”—from lyrics that encourage a state of “wastedness” in performer and audience, to technical evolutions in packaging (LPs, 8-track, VHS, CDs, etc.) that beget unending cycles of junk for each new generation to throw away.

“One of the great paradoxes of both Woodstock concerts,” says Hamelman, “is the fact that in both cases the supposedly green-friendly youth audiences trashed the environment on a major scale.”

But this fundamentally “trashy” music has its upside, as the author describes in the final section of the book, called “Saved.” The music’s impact has been persuasively positive for countless thousands. “For
many people, including me, nothing will ever surpass rock’n’ roll in
the bliss department,” says Hamelman, who describes himself as “a very straight-edge guy who has never tasted a mind-altering or mood-swinging substance” and who decries the myth that the drugs and rock are somehow joined at the hip. “You don’t need heroin to get high on rock,” he says, speaking from experience.

All of which goes to show that sometimes the drummer is the smart one.

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A new book co-authored by three professors with Coastal Carolina University ties is designed to help educators understand and meet the unique challenges required for successful teaching in the middle school environment.

The book is by Gilbert H. Hunt, dean of Coastal’s Spadoni College of Education; Dennis Wiseman, associate provost for academics at Coastal; and Sandra Pope Bowden, former dean of the School of Education at Charleston Southern University and a former education professor at Coastal.

According to the authors, successful middle school teachers in today’s schools must adopt a teaching philosophy that accommodates both the strong focus currently being given to increasing student achievement based on standardized testing and the equally important emphasis on
student- centered approaches to teaching, learning and the
development of the whole child.

“The methods outlined in the book reflect our basic philosophy that the teacher ultimately determines the quality of the school and that the learning environment should be student-centered while maintaining a strong academic foundation,” said Hunt.

Topics discussed in The Modern Middle School include the psychological development of middle school students, approaches and skills relevant to effective instruction, planning the curriculum, and assessing and reporting student progress.

This is the third book on which Hunt and Wiseman have collaborated.
They have also co-authored Best Practice in Motivation and Management in the Classroom and, with Coastal education professor Timothy Touzel,
Effective Teaching: Preparation and Implementation, now in its third
printing.

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While many faculty books are used in classrooms as textbooks, they are not necessarily embraced by students. Until now.

“Hey, this is what we talk about every day,” says Julie Mara, a Coastal sophomore majoring in English with a minor in women’s studies.
“Now we are reading about it and talking about it in class!”

“It” is sex, and the book they’re reading is Jane Sexes It Up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire, an anthology of essays examining romance from a contemporary feminist viewpoint collected by Lisa Johnson, an English professor at Coastal. Readings from the book were assigned to students in a Studies in Women Writers course, and it provided hot discussion in a roomful of about 10 females and two taciturn males.

Controversy over the subject matter—can romance/sex co-exist with feminism?—is what inspired Johnson to collect these essays by 21 young women including herself (all Ph.D.s), in a treatise that insists women can have it all. “I had been writing these personal essays, and there was nowhere to put them, no feminist journals,” says Johnson, who was then at Binghamton University, where she earned her Ph.D. She put out a call for papers and, in six months, the book was at a publishing house that was in the market for a book on the new feminism. “I was lucky; there’s not much out there that is autobiographical but also theoretical.”

Critics have praised the book for its refreshingly frank approach. “This is not your mother’s feminism,” warns Johnson, explaining that the new wave has distanced itself from the feminism of the 1960s, now considered by some as too male-bashing and overly limiting in terms of female desire. “At first I wasn’t interested in feminism because I had bought into all the myths.” Having grown up in a small western Georgia town, she knows about the culture of polite acquiescence.

After answering the students’ questions, many about her personal life, Johnson encourages them to read more on the topic of feminism, citing the 10 pages of bibliography and 25 pages of notes in the back of Jane Sexes It Up.

“It’s definitely a commitment to frankness,” Johnson says of her anthology. “It’s not about denying yourself, but about exploring a whole new culture. Feminism is the place where people don’t succumb to politeness, where you can talk about all those things you’re taught not to talk about!”

Johnson is currently working on a new book, a feminist analysis of HBO series such as Six Feet Under, Sex and the City and The Sopranos.

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To commemorate its centennial celebration in 2003, Conway National Bank commissioned Roy Talbert to write an official history of the institution. But, as its title indicates, the book covers a good deal more than the successful evolution of one financial corporation.

Actually, the title is too modest. In order to tell the economic history of modern Horry County, Talbert has had to include a fair amount of political history and social history, as well a lot of just plain old history. The result could more accurately be described as the biography of a community.

Although the book chronicles the past 116 years (from the coming of the railroad in 1887 to the CNB centennial last year), about three-quarters of its pages as well as its narrative heart is devoted to the roughly 50-year period beginning with the last decade of the 19th century to the end of World War II. This is a time when seemingly the entire county was united in a grassroots effort to rise above circumstances and put itself on the map.

Beset by a host of disadvantages including geographical inaccessibility, floods and hurricanes, an absence of infrastructure, a lack of political influence, and more than its share of general poverty and ignorance, Horry would probably have remained mired in its post-Civil War stagnation indefinitely were it not for the faith, foresight and industry of a handful of leaders from around the county.
These bankers, businessmen, farmers, lumbermen and newspaper editors were unabashed boosters. “They were a small group, but what a load they carried.” writes Talbert. “After over 40 years of studying the progressive mind, this author stands in awe of their accomplishments, their dedication, and their commitment to community service.”

In addition to the establishment of banks, projects fostered by the people of Horry include the cultivation and marketing of tobacco, the building of roads and railways, and the development and promotion of Myrtle Beach as a tourist resort (a hard sell in the beginning).

Talbert, a Coastal history professor since 1979 and chair of the department for many years, is the author of many books, but he has become something of a specialist in corporate and organizational histories. His book on the history of Coastal Carolina University will appear in 2005.

So Much To Be Thankful For is being distributed free of charge at all Conway National Bank locations.

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