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Literary and Cultural Studies
Beyond 1776
Globalizing the Cultures of the American RevolutionIn Beyond 1776, ten humanities scholars consider the American Revolution within a global framework. The foundation of the United States was deeply enmeshed with shifting alliances and multiple actors, with politics saturated by imaginative literature, and with ostensible bilateral negotiations that... More
Parting Words
Victorian Poetry and Public AddressValedictory addresses offer a way to conceptualize the relation of self to others, private to public, ephemeral to eternal. Whether deathbed pronouncements, political capitulations, or seafaring farewells, "parting words" played a crucial role in the social imagination of Victorian writing. In this... More
Women Fight, Women Write
Texts on the Algerian WarToday, the "fight to write"—the struggle to become the legitimate chronicler of one’s own story—is being waged and won by women across mediums and borders. But such battles of authorship extend well beyond a single cultural moment. In her gripping study of unsung female narratives of the Algerian... More
Reading Contagion
The Hazards of Reading in the Age of PrintEighteenth-century British culture was transfixed by the threat of contagion, believing that everyday elements of the surrounding world could transmit deadly maladies from one body to the next. Physicians and medical writers warned of noxious matter circulating through air, bodily fluids, paper,... More
Resurrections
Authors, Heroes—and a SpyJeffrey Meyers’ Resurrections: Authors, Heroes—and a Spy brings to life a set of extraordinary writers, painters, and literary adventurers who turned their lives into art. Meyers knew nine of these figures, in some cases intimately, while five others he admires and regrets never meeting. As he... More
Guilty Pleasures
Popular Novels and American Audiences in the Long Nineteenth CenturyGuilty pleasures in one’s reading habits are nothing new. Late-nineteenth-century American literary culture even championed the idea that popular novels need not be great. Best-selling novels arrived in the public sphere as at once beloved and contested objects, an ambivalence that reflected and... More
Sucking Up
A Brief Consideration of SycophancySuck-up. Ass-kisser. Brownnoser. Bootlicker. Lickspittle. Toadeater... Found in every walk of life, both real and imagined, sycophants surround us. But whether we grumble about sycophancy or grudgingly tolerate it as a price of getting along in a complex society, we rarely examine it closely. This... More
The Physics of Possibility
Victorian Fiction, Science, and GenderThe Physics of Possibility traces the sensational birth of mathematical physics in Victorian literature, science, and statistics. As scientists took up new breakthroughs in quantification, they showed how all sorts of phenomena—the condition of stars, atoms, molecules, and nerves—could be... More
Reading Popular Newtonianism
Print, the Principia, and the Dissemination of Newtonian ScienceSir Isaac Newton’s publications, and those he inspired, were among the most significant works published during the long eighteenth century in Britain. Concepts such as attraction and extrapolation—detailed in his landmark monograph Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica—found their way into... More
A Literary Guide to Washington, DC
Walking in the Footsteps of American Writers from Francis Scott Key to Zora Neale HurstonThe site of a thriving literary tradition, Washington, DC, has been the home to many of our nation’s most acclaimed writers. From the city’s founding to the beginnings of modernism, literary luminaries including Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Henry Adams, Langston Hughes,... More
How Borges Wrote
A distinguished poet and essayist and one of the finest writers of short stories in world letters, Jorge Luis Borges deliberately and regularly altered his work by extensive revision. In this volume, renowned Borges scholar Daniel Balderston undertakes to piece together Borges's creative process... More
Stranger America
A Narrative Ethics of ExclusionContradictory ideals of egalitarianism and self-reliance haunt America’s democratic state. We need look no further than Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and victory for proof that early twentieth-century anxieties about individualism, race, and the foreign or intrusive "other" persist... More
Women Writers of the Beat Era
Autobiography and IntertextualityThe Beat Generation was a group of writers who rejected cultural standards, experimented with drugs, and celebrated sexual liberation. Starting in the 1950s with works such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, the Beat Generation defined an... More
Paper Gardens
A Stroll through French LiteratureFrom Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Marcel Proust, from Marguerite Duras to George Sand, from Colette to Patrick Modiano, gardens appear in novels as representations of the real world, but also as reflections of the imagination. In Paper Gardens: A Stroll through French Literature, Évelyne Bloch-Dano... More
Shakespeare's Ocean
An Ecocritical ExplorationStudy of the sea--both in terms of human interaction with it and its literary representation--has been largely ignored by ecocritics. In Shakespeare’s Ocean, Dan Brayton foregrounds the maritime dimension of a writer whose plays and poems have had an enormous impact on literary notions of nature... More
The Eighteenth Centuries
Global Networks of EnlightenmentToday, when "globalization" is a buzzword invoked in nearly every realm, we turn back to the eighteenth century and witness the inherent globalization of its desires and, at times, its accomplishments. During the chronological eighteenth century, learning and knowledge were intimately connected... More
Best New Poets 2017
50 Poems from Emerging WritersEntering its twelfth year, Best New Poets has established itself as a crucial venue for rising poets and a valuable resource for poetry lovers. The only publication of its kind, this annual anthology is made up exclusively of work by writers who have not yet published a full-length book. The poems... More
Pirating Fictions
Ownership and Creativity in Nineteenth-Century Popular CultureTwo distinctly different meanings of piracy are ingeniously intertwined in Monica Cohen's lively new book, which shows how popular depictions of the pirate held sway on the page and the stage even as their creators were preoccupied with the ravages of literary appropriation. The golden age of... More
Willful Submission
Sado-Erotics and Heavenly Marriage in Victorian Religious PoetryVictorian England: a Jesuit priest writes of wrestling with God at night, limbs entangled; an Anglican sister begs Jesus, her divine lover, to end her aching anticipation of their union; a clergyman exhorts nuns to study the example of medieval women who suffered on the rack in order to become "... More
Imitation Nation
Red, White, and Blackface in Early and Antebellum US LiteratureHow did early Americans define themselves? The American exceptionalist perspective tells us that the young republic rejected Europeans, Native Americans, and African Americans in order to isolate a national culture and a white national identity. Imitativeness at this time was often seen as... More
The Pragmatist Turn
Religion, the Enlightenment, and the Formation of American LiteratureIn The Pragmatist Turn, renowned scholar of American literature and thought Giles Gunn offers a new critical history of the way seventeenth-century religion and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment influenced the formation of subsequent American writing. This shaping was dependent on their... More
The Illiberal Imagination
Class and the Rise of the U.S. NovelThe Illiberal Imagination offers a synthetic, historical formalist account of how—and to what end—U.S. novels from the late eighteenth century to the mid-1850s represented economic inequality and radical forms of economic egalitarianism in the new nation. In conversation with intellectual, social... More
Genre Theory and Historical Change
Theoretical Essays of Ralph CohenRalph Cohen was highly regarded as the visionary founding editor of New Literary History, but his own theoretical essays appeared in such a scattering of publications that their conceptual originality, underlying coherence, and range of application have not been readily apparent. This new selection... More
East-West Exchange and Late Modernism
Williams, Moore, PoundIn East-West Exchange and Late Modernism, Zhaoming Qian examines the nature and extent of Asian influence on some of the literary masterpieces of Western late modernism. Focusing on the poets William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound, Qian relates captivating stories about their... More
The Word on the Streets
The American Language of Vernacular ModernismFrom the hard-boiled detective stories of Dashiell Hammett to the novels of Claude McKay, The Word on the Streets examines a group of writers whose experimentation with the vernacular argues for a rethinking of American modernism—one that cuts across traditional boundaries of class, race, and... More