Literary and Cultural Studies

To what extent has the growing popular demand for a vicarious experience of other cultures fueled the expectation that the most important task for regional and ethnic writers is to capture and convey authentic cultural material to their readers? In The Romance of Authenticity, Jeff Karem argues... More

Furious Flower: African-American Poetry from the Black Arts Movement to the PresentEdited by Joanne V. GabbinThe Furious Flower Conference of 1994 represented the largest gathering of African American writers at one event in nearly thirty years. In that crucial span of time, African American poetry... More

The fifty-fourth volume of Studies continues its tradition of presenting a wide range of articles by international scholars on bibliography, textual criticism, and other aspects of the study of books.The volume opens with G. Thomas Tanselle’s latest survey of writings on textual criticism, this one... More

From Robert Southey to William Morris, British social critics in the Romantic tradition consistently stigmatized industry as a threat to aesthetic or humanistic "culture." Joseph Bizup argues that early Victorian advocates of industry sought to resist the power inherent in this opposition by... More

In 1821, Maria Dundas Graham sailed for South America on H.M.S. Doris, a ship sent to protect British mercantile interests in that volatile region. After her husband, the ship’s captain Thomas Graham, died en route, the newly widowed Maria Graham landed in Valparaíso, Chile. Resisting all efforts... More

Largely ignored in American literary history, the magazine novel was extremely popular throughout the nineteenth century, with editors describing the form as a virtual "necessity" for magazines. Unlike many previous studies of periodicals that focus often exclusively on elite literary magazines,... More

In Common Wealth Sarah Kennedy and R. T. Smith mine the deep vein of Virginia poetry to present a comprehensive collection of contemporary works that reflects the vibrant community of poets working today. Notable for its ethnic diversity, Common Wealth showcases the work of fifty-three poets—all of... More

In Common Wealth Sarah Kennedy and R. T. Smith mine the deep vein of Virginia poetry to present a comprehensive collection of contemporary works that reflects the vibrant community of poets working today. Notable for its ethnic diversity, Common Wealth showcases the work of fifty-three poets—all of... More

Scholars have long recognized that narrative suspense dominates the formal dynamics of nineteenth-century British fiction, both high and low. But few have asked why suspense played such a crucial role in the Victorian novel—and in Victorian culture more broadly. The Serious Pleasures of Suspense... More

As the mother of young sons, Marilyn Wesley became increasingly concerned about the conflicting messages they received in a world where "Han Solo replaced John Wayne as a national hero and the lost war in Vietnam was mediated by GI Joe dolls and Rambo movies." What, she wondered, do the stories we... More

This eleventh volume of a projected twelve continues the series of William James’s correspondence with family, friends, and colleagues that began with volume 4. Consisting of some 500 letters, with an additional 650 letters calendared, volume 11 gives a complete accounting of James’s known... More

In recent cultural studies, poetry has become something of a neglected genre. Warwick Slinn seeks to reverse that trend and argues that a fundamental continuity between the meaning of a poetic trope and the social function of language can be established through speech act theory—specifically... More

On a December day in 1885, Bill Barnes, a journeyman from the New York World, and Joe McCann, representing the New York Herald, faced off in a match race of Swifts, compositors who set type by hand, individually, letter by letter, with incredible accuracy and speed. McCann got off to a slow start,... More

Turning to Earth offers a window into the heart of environmental change, moving beyond the culture’s traditional reliance on policy reforms and technological measures. It charts the course of "ecological conversion," a dynamic inner process by which people come to ally themselves with the natural... More

Vernon Lee, born Violet Paget in 1856 to English parents who lived on the Continent, bridged two worlds and many cultures. She was a Victorian by birth but lived into the second quarter of the twentieth century. Her chosen home was Italy, but she spent part of every year in England, where she... More

Dealing with poetry is frequently problematic for the university teacher and student: although undergraduates are usually responsive to discussions about drama and prose, poetry often silences the classroom. Unless a poem provides references easily applicable to their own lives, many students feel... More

"In wildness is the preservation of the world," wrote Henry David Thoreau. But how the wild and the managed or artificially arranged environments co-exist has been a matter of intense debate among foresters and landscape professionals at least since the era of Frederick Law Olmsted Sr.In Forest and... More

The Long Day is a wonderfully readable personal narrative of the trials and tribulations of an "unskilled, friendless, almost penniless girl of eighteen, utterly alone in the world" who arrives in New York City in 1905 to earn her livelihood.The book reveals much about the lives of working women in... More

What role did Chinese art play in the poetic development of Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens? How could they share Chinese artists’ Dao, an aesthetic held to be beyond verbal representation? In this sequel to his critically acclaimed study Orientalism and Modernism, Zhaoming Qian... More

In this expanded edition of Randall Jarrell's letters, his widow, Mary, has added letters from Jarrell to Peter Taylor, publication of which was withheld during Taylor's lifetime. Taylor was, along with Robert Lowell, Jarrell's oldest and closest friend, and the inclusion of these incomparable... More

In an exploration of how contemporary fiction narratives represent trauma—that response to events so overwhelmingly intense that normal responses become impaired—Laurie Vickroy engages a wealth of the twentieth century’s most striking literature. Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Jazz, Marguerite Duras’s... More

Nora Strejilevich was a young woman when her brother and other family members and friends disappeared at the hands of the military junta that held power in Argentina from 1976 to 1983. Ostensibly part of a systematic campaign to eliminate left-wing terrorism, the violence perpetrated by the junta... More

The fifty-third volume of Studies continues its tradition of presenting a wide range of articles by international scholars on bibliography, textual criticism, and other aspects of the study of books.The volume opens with unpublished lectures by one of the twentieth century’s most distinguished... More

Throughout the nineteenth century, but most intensely in the reign of Queen Victoria, England and Scotland produced an unprecedented range of extraordinary illustrated books. Images in books became a central feature of Victorian culture. They were at once prestigious and popular—a kind of... More

Consisting of some 572 letters, with another 460 calendared, this tenth volume in a projected series of twelve offers a complete accounting of William James’s known correspondence—with family, friends, and colleagues—from the beginning of 1902 through March 1905.For James these were hopeful years... More