Rappaccini\u27s Children: American Writers in a Calvinist World

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Rappaccini’s Daughter” tells of a beautiful girl who has, from birth, absorbed the poison from the flowers of her father’s garden. In this allegorical tale of the fallen Garden of Eden, William H. Shurr finds a metaphor for the fate of many American writers, for whom the heritage of Calvinism has been the poisoned fruit of the Garden of the New World. For many American writers, the legacy of the Puritan Fathers has been a pervasive sense of sinfulness and guilt in a violent and unforgiving universe. In this new study Shurr examines how these writers have coped with this heritage. William H. Shurr, who holds degrees in both theology and literature, is professor of English at the University of Tennessee. His earlier book, The Mystery of Iniquity: Melville as Poet, was co-winner of the 1971 SAMLA Studies Award. An original, far-reaching, and powerful critique of the fate of Calvinism in American culture. It is a work of genuine importance for scholars in every area of American studies. —Sacvan Bercovitchhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/1030/thumbnail.jp

Effects of Advertising and Product Differentiation Upon Industry Growth Rates

The static theory of the firm suggests that advertising expenditures may restrict output and retard growth. The specific hypothesis upon which this study is based states that advertising and product differentiation will indeed retard industry growth rates

The Mystery of Iniquity: Melville as Poet, 1857–1891

This book is the first to consider the work of Herman Melville’s later years as a whole, in the light of his life and reading during those years and of the intellectual and artistic ambience of the later nineteenth century. With the exception of Billy Budd, almost all of the writing Melville produced between 1857 and 1891 is poetry. Until now little attention has been given to the poetry and it has been customary to view Melville’s final masterpiece, Billy Budd, against the background of the earlier fiction—almost as if the writing of the intervening thirty-four years had not existed. William H. Shurr, who has studied the poems with close attention to the Melville manuscripts in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, contends that Melville’s poetry merits more attention and appreciation than has hitherto been accorded it. Concerned principally with the maturation of Melville’s darker themes, he has been the first to study the carefully designed sequences in which Melville published his poems. He has also discovered in the poems thematic patterns—among them Melville’s heterodox Christology and his concept of a particular kind of individualism found in what he calls the “transcendent act”—that shed new light on the complexities of Billy Budd. William H. Shurr holds the S.T.L. (theology) from Loyola University and the Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina. He teaches English at Washington State University and serves on the editorial boards of Poe Studies and Emerson Society Quarterly. The Mystery of Iniquity is the 1971 SAMLA Studies Award co-winner.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/1031/thumbnail.jp

Mutational and phenotypic characterisation of hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia

Hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia (HHT) is an autosomal dominant vascular dysplasia. Care delivery for HHT patients is impeded by the need for laborious, repeated phenotyping and gaps in knowledge regarding the relationships between causal DNA variants in ENG, ACVRL1, SMAD4 and GDF2, and clinical manifestations. To address this, we analyzed DNA samples from 183 previously uncharacterized, unrelated HHT and suspected HHT cases using the ThromboGenomics high-throughput sequencing platform. We identified 127 rare variants across 168 heterozygous genotypes. Applying modified American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics Guidelines, 106 variants were classified as pathogenic/likely pathogenic and 21 as nonpathogenic (variant of uncertain significance/benign). Unlike the protein products of ACVRL1 and SMAD4, the extracellular ENG amino acids are not strongly conserved. Our inferences of the functional consequences of causal variants in ENG were therefore informed by the crystal structure of endoglin. We then compared the accuracy of predictions of the causal gene blinded to the genetic data using 2 approaches: subjective clinical predictions and statistical predictions based on 8 Human Phenotype Ontology terms. Both approaches had some predictive power, but they were insufficiently accurate to be used clinically, without genetic testing. The distributions of red cell indices differed by causal gene but not sufficiently for clinical use in isolation from genetic data. We conclude that parallel sequencing of the 4 known HHT genes, multidisciplinary team review of variant calls in the context of detailed clinical information, and statistical and structural modeling improve the prognostication and treatment of HHT