Professor Gary Taylor expected the release of The New Oxford Shakespeare to garner media attention.

“Any time you say something new about Shakespeare,” he says, “the press will be interested, and some people will be shocked.”

In his new book Mania for Freedom, John Mac Kilgore introduces and defines a new mode of literature, what he identifies as "a literature of enthusiasm."

Throughout her academic career, Rhea Estelle Lathan has been a strong advocate for African American literacy, and her scholarly studies on the subject jelled in the fall of 2015. That's when Lathan's book Freedom Writing became available through the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), an achievement that beat the organization's steep odds for publication.

When discussions about advancements in rhetoric and composition studies occur, Kathleen Yancey not only brings her expertise to the talks; often she leads the conversation.

Daily routines, mundane activities, ordinary objects and experiences - those themes do not usually come to mind when a person thinks about literature or poetry. However, as Andrew Epstein demonstrates in his new book, Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture (Oxford UP, 2016), modern writers have been intensely interested in rendering and documenting the daily life.

For her most recent book, "Making Chaucer's Book of the Duchess: Textuality and Reception" (U of Wales P, 2015), Jamie Fumo read and studied more than 300 articles and book chapters published on the English poet's first major narrative poem. The process initially intimidated the medieval scholar, but that sense of feeling overwhelmed eventually developed into excitement as Fumo realized she was working "to become the steward of a single Chaucerian poem."

Roberts knows that conversations about college football need to go deeper than talk about wins and losses, in-state rivalries, and perfectly run pass routes.

In her new book, "Women's Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories" (Southern Illinois UP, 2015), Tarez Samra Graban examines some conventional characterizations of irony but she also argues for a redefinition of the concept, especially in how histories get written of women's rhetorical performances.

Hundreds of years from now, historians and digital scholars will be studying the modern-day technology and media revolution, examining its impact on societies and cultures. For a deeper understanding of those changes and their roots, researchers in the future would be wise to read Anne Coldiron's most recent book, "Printers without Borders: Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance".

Professor Kathleen Yancey's recent publication "Writing across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing", which she co-authored with former Florida State rhetoric and composition doctoral students Liane Robertson and Kara Taczak, has been in circulation since only about the middle of 2014. The scope of the trio's research findings is already starting to expand, however, and the book recently won the 2015 CCCC Research Impact Award.