To check out ebooks from Libby, go to https://libbyapp.com/library/njedge and sign in with your RCBC library barcode. If you have the Libby App already for your BCLS Library Card, you can add a 2nd library (RCBC) and switch between the two accounts.
A Doll's House by
When A Doll’s House was first published in 1879 it created a sensation. The play follows the ordinary life of a housewife. Gradually the tensions within her marriage become clear and build to a final, stunning action. The play is widely studied because of its sharp critique of 19th century marriage norms, and its feminist tendencies.
The Hanging Stranger by
TV repairman Ed Loyce sets out for what he thinks will be a typical day at work - and finds himself in a world in which everything has been turned topsy-turvy. The first indication that things are amiss occurs when Loyce spies a stomach-turning abomination in the town park - and none of his fellow citizens seem to care. Find out what’s gone wrong by reading this chilling short story from master of the weird Philip K. Dick.
Poems on various subjects, religious and moral by The Weary Blues by 
The Yellow Wallpaper by
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story, The Yellow Wallpaper is a valuable piece of American feminist literature that reveals attitudes toward the psychological health of women in the nineteenth century. Diagnosed with “temporary nervous depression - a slight hysterical tendency” by her physician husband, a woman is confined to an upstairs bedroom. Descending into psychosis at the complete lack of stimulation, she starts obsessing over the room’s yellow wallpaper: “It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw - not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper - the smell!… The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell.”
Please check the catalog or databases, or contact RCBC Library to see if book is currently available. Here are a few suggestions:
The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin by
Although she enjoyed only modest success during her lifetime, Kate Chopin is now recognised as a unique voice in American literature. Her seminal novel, The Awakening, published in 1899, explored new and startling territory, and stunned readers with its frank depiction of the limits of marriage and motherhood. Chopin's aesthetic tastes and cultural influences were drawn from both the European and American traditions, and her manipulation of her 'foreignness' contributed to the composition of a complex voice that was strikingly different to that of her contemporaries. The essays in this Companion treat a wide range of Chopin's stories and novels, drawing her relationship with other writers, genres and literary developments, and pay close attention to the transatlantic dimension of her work. The result is a collection that brings a fresh perspective to Chopin's writing, one that will appeal to researchers and students of American, nineteenth-century, and feminist literature.
Approaches to Teaching Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper" and Herland by 
The Yellow Wall-Paper by
From the Illustrator: "The line art in this graphic novel was created in such a way as to mirror a sense of 'the hand, ' because the main character in the story is journaling the story. At times, then, the art will begin to fragment as the panels proceed, to match the inner state of the character. The choice of sepia color lends an 'aged' feel, as if you were going back in time to peek at the character's own handwriting and sketches." *** "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a short story that was published in 1892 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in "The Forerunner," after Gilman suffered a serious downturn with depression, upon taking a doctor's advice to engage in the "rest cure" and abandon creative pursuits forever. Now, more than a hundred years later, this image-rich work has been interpreted by artist Sara Barkat -in a manner that combines both philosophical thought and visual intrigue. Sometimes understood as feminist literature, sometimes understood as exploring mental illness, and sometimes understood as both at the same time, this story is oddly poetic even when it is chilling and challenging. The tale contains subtexts that touch upon the nature of Imagination, as well as the act of Writing, and the artist has enhanced these subtexts with the inclusion of Victorian flower symbols, such as thistle for independence and lupine for imagination.Watch, too, for the appearance of some of history's most imaginative art, refashioned and in dialog with the story at hand, which gives a sense of timelessness and broader societal import to the tale. The Yellow Wallpaper Summary-see tweetspeakpoetry.com/the-yellow-wall-paper-summary/ In The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a woman is persuaded by her husband, John, to take the rest cure from an ambiguous nervous breakdown (possibly linked to post-partum depression). The house they go to is old, broken-down, and, our unnamed narrator and main character thinks, quite possibly haunted-at least if she's being fanciful. But she's not supposed to be fanciful; that's what John says. Nor is she supposed to visit other people, or to write-though writing is our narrator's work and what she is most passionate about. Still, she writes in secret, and the journal entries she creates are the story we see unfold, as our narrator, stuck inside most of the time in a room with hideous yellow wallpaper, begins to wonder if there's something more sinister to her situation than it seems at first. Because, you see, our narrator begins to notice something odd in the wallpaper. Shapes that move and resolve into a woman... a woman behind bars! Becoming ever more certain that the wallpaper has some insidious influence on her husband and her husband's sister (Jennie), as well as herself, our narrator finally resolves to tear down the paper and lock herself inside her room just as they are about to move out of the abandoned house. Succumbing to what seems like madness, our narrator finally finds a measure of agency, forcing John to listen to her, as he never has throughout the story, no matter how rationally she has tried to state her case. In the end, upon opening the door and seeing her tied to the window and creeping endlessly around the room, John faints, and our narrator continues creeping, triumphant-though she still has to creep over him every time she goes around.The Yellow Wallpaper Characters-for full descriptions see https: //www.tweetspeakpoetry.com/the-yellow-wallpaper-characters/ Unnamed protagonist & narrator (journals the story) John (protagonist's husband, a physician who thinks he knows how to cure his wife) Jennie (John's sister) Jane (ambiguous) Mary (wet nurse) baby (the protagonist's) protagonist's unnamed brother ("My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing.") Weir Mitchell (a real-life physician and author who popularized the rest cure)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman by Charlotte Perkins Gilman by 
Charlotte Perkins Gilman by
During her lifetime, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was a popular writer, public speaker, and social reformer whose literary interests ranged from short stories, novels, and nonfiction philosophical studies to poetry, newspaper columns, plays, and many other genres. Though she fell into obscurity after her death, there has been a resurgence of interest in Gilman's works among literary scholars. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: New Texts, New Contexts represents a new phase of feminist scholarship in recovery, drawing readers' attention to Gilman's lesser-known works from fresh perspectives that revise what we thought we knew about the author and her work. Volume contributors consider an array of texts that have not yet enjoyed adequate critical scrutiny, including Gilman's short fiction, drama, and writing for periodicals, as well as her long fiction. Similarly, incorporating careful archival, biographical, and historical research, contributors explore Gilman's life and writings--including her most famous story, "The Yellow Wall-Paper"--through strikingly new critical lenses. Other essays included here assess Gilman's place in a longer historical trajectory and within multiple rhetorical traditions, from the genre of feminist humor to the canon of African American women's literary production.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's the Yellow Wall-Paper and the History of Its Publication and Reception by
Since its publication in 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper" has always been recognized as a powerful statement about the victimization of a woman whose neurasthenic condition is completely misdiagnosed, mistreated, and misunderstood, leaving her to face insanity alone, as a prisoner in her own bedroom. Never before, however, has the story itself been portrayed as victimized. In this first critical edition of Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper," accompanied by contemporary reviews and previously unpublished letters, Julie Bates Dock examines the various myth-frames that have been used to legitimize Gilman's story. The editor discusses how modern feminist critics' readings (and misreadings) of the available documents uphold a set of legends that originated with Gilman herself and that promulgate an almost saintly view of the pioneering feminist author. The documents made available in the collection enable scholars and students to evaluate firsthand Gilman's claims regarding the story's impact on its first audiences. Dock presents an authoritative text of "The Yellow Wall-paper" for the first time since its initial publication. Included are a textual commentary, full descriptions of all relevant texts, lists of editorial emendations and pre-copy-text substantive variants, a complete historical collation that documents all the variants found in important editions after 1892, and a listing of textual sources for more than one hundred reprintings of the story in anthologies and textbooks. Other documents in the casebook that illuminate the story's publication and reception histories include Gilman's successive and varying accounts of the story's history, her diary and manuscript log entries and letters pertaining to the story, W. D. Howells's correspondence with Gilman and Horace Scudder, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and his remarks on the story when he reprinted it in Great American Short Stories, and more than two dozen reviews of the story by Gilman's contemporaries. Taken together, the criticism, text, documents, and annotations constitute a rich and valuable contribution to Gilman scholarship, calling into question the feminist literary criticism that has helped to shape interpretations of a literary masterpiece.
Langston Hughes and the Blues by
The shades and structures of the blues had an immense impact on the poetry of Langston Hughes. Steven C. Tracy provides a cultural context for Hughes's work while revealing how Hughes mined Black oral and literary traditions to create his poetry. Comparing Hughes's poems to blues texts, Tracy reveals how Hughes's experimental forms reflect the poetics, structures, rhythms, and musical techniques of the music. Tracy also offers a discography of recordings by the artists--Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and others--who most influenced the poet.
The Letters of Shirley Jackson by
A bewitchingly brilliant collection of never-before-published letters from the renowned author of "The Lottery" and The Haunting of Hill House NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS * "This biography-through-letters gives an intimate and warm voice to the imagination behind the treasury of uncanny tales that is Shirley Jackson's legacy."--Joyce Carol Oates Shirley Jackson is one of the most important American authors of the last hundred years and among our greatest chroniclers of the female experience. This extraordinary compilation of personal correspondence has all the hallmarks of Jackson's beloved fiction: flashes of the uncanny in the domestic, sparks of horror in the quotidian, and the veins of humor that run through good times and bad. i am having a fine time doing a novel with my left hand and a long story--with as many levels as grand central station--with my right hand, stirring chocolate pudding with a spoon held in my teeth, and tuning the television with both feet. Written over the course of nearly three decades, from Jackson's college years to six days before her early death at the age of forty-eight, these letters become the autobiography Shirley Jackson never wrote. As well as being a bestselling author, Jackson spent much of her adult life as a mother of four in Vermont, and the landscape here is often the everyday: raucous holidays and trips to the dentist, overdue taxes and frayed lines of Christmas lights, new dogs and new babies. But in recounting these events to family, friends, and colleagues, she turns them into remarkable stories: entertaining, revealing, and wise. At the same time, many of these letters provide fresh insight into the genesis and progress of Jackson's writing over nearly three decades. The novel is getting sadder. It's always such a strange feeling--I know something's going to happen, and those poor people in the book don't; they just go blithely on their ways. Compiled and edited by her elder son, Laurence Jackson Hyman, in consultation with Jackson scholar Bernice M. Murphy and featuring Jackson's own witty line drawings, this intimate collection holds the beguiling prism of Shirley Jackson--writer and reader, mother and daughter, neighbor and wife--up to the light.
Shirley Jackson by
Shirley Jackson was one of America's most prominent female writers of the 1950s. Between 1948 and 1965 she published one best-selling story collection, six novels, two popular volumes of her family chronicles and many stories, which ranged from fairly conventional tales for the women's magazine market to the ambiguous, allusive, delicately sinister and more obviously literary stories that were closest to Jackson's heart and destined to end up in the more highbrow end of the market. Most critical discussions of Jackson tend to focus on ""The Lottery"" and The Haunting of Hill House. An author of such accomplishment - and one so fully engaged with the pressures and preoccupations of postwar America - merits fuller discussion. To that end, this collection of essays widens the scope of Jackson scholarship with new writing on such works as The Road through the Wall and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and topics ranging from Jackson's domestic fiction to ethics, cosmology, and eschatology. The book also makes newly available some of the most significant Jackson scholarship published in the last two decades.
RCBC Library is part of the Burlington County Library System (BCLS)!
Your RCBC Library barcode allows you to check out physical material at other BCLS branches. (A separate BCLS Library card is needed to access their online resources.)
If another branch has a book that you are looking for, either call them to place it on hold for you, or as a RCBC librarian to call for you.
Note: a book that shows up as being in another branch may be currently in use by another patron. Save yourself a trip and call to double check the book's availability!
Inter-library Loans
If a book that you want is not available in the RCBC Library or BCLS, we can attempt to order the book from an outside library to be delivered to the RCBC Library. Note: this method may take 2 weeks or longer for the book to arrive at RCBC.
To order a book via inter-library loan, please either fill out a blank form from JerseyCat or contact Debbie Kolodziej at dkolodzie@rcbc.edu.
Faculty Book Requests
Research assistance - help finding sources, evaluating sources
Online workshops for citing and plagiarism are held throughout the semester. To request a citing workshop, please email library@rcbc.edu
