Literary Criticism

Since the 1990s, there has been unparalleled growth in the literary output from an ever more diverse group of Latinx writers. Extant criticism, however, has yet to catch up with the diversity of writers we label Latinx and the range of themes about which they write. Little sustained scholarly attention has been paid, moreover, to the very category under which we group this literature. Latinx Literature Unbound, thus, begins with a fundamental question “What does it mean to label a work of literature or an entire corpus of literature Latinx?” From this question others emerge: What does Latinx allow or predispose us to see, and what does it preclude us from seeing? If the grouping—which brings together a heterogeneous collection of people under a seemingly homogeneous label—tells us something meaningful, is there a poetics we can develop that would facilitate our analysis of this literature?

In answering these questions, Latinx Literature Unbound frees Latinx literature from taken-for-granted critical assumptions about identity and theme. It argues that there may be more salubrious taxonomies than Latinx for organizing and analyzing this literature. Privileging the act of reading as a temporal, meaning-making event, Ralph E. Rodriguez argues that genre may be a more durable category for analyzing this literature and suggests new ways we might proceed with future studies of the writing we have come to identify as Latinx.

Since the 1990s, there has been unparalleled growth in the literary output from an ever more diverse group of Latinx writers. Extant criticism, however, has yet to catch up with the diversity of writers we label Latinx and the range of themes about which they write. Little sustained scholarly attention has been paid, moreover, to the very category under which we group this literature. Latinx Literature Unbound, thus, begins with a fundamental question “What does it mean to label a work of literature or an entire corpus of literature Latinx?” From this question others emerge: What does Latinx allow or predispose us to see, and what does it preclude us from seeing? If the grouping—which brings together a heterogeneous collection of people under a seemingly homogeneous label—tells us something meaningful, is there a poetics we can develop that would facilitate our analysis of this literature?

In answering these questions, Latinx Literature Unbound frees Latinx literature from taken-for-granted critical assumptions about identity and theme. It argues that there may be more salubrious taxonomies than Latinx for organizing and analyzing this literature. Privileging the act of reading as a temporal, meaning-making event, Ralph E. Rodriguez argues that genre may be a more durable category for analyzing this literature and suggests new ways we might proceed with future studies of the writing we have come to identify as Latinx.

A dramatic and necessary rethinking of the meaning of Democracy

Democratic Anarchy grapples with an uncomfortable but obvious truth inimical to democracy: both aesthetics and politics depend on the structuring antagonism of inclusion and exclusion. Yet in Democratic Anarchy, Matthew Scully asks, how can “the people” be represented in a way that acknowledges what remains unrepresentable? What would it mean to face up to the constitutive exclusions that haunt U.S. democracy and its anxious fantasies of equality?

Synthesizing a broad range of theoretical traditions and interlocutors—including Lacan, Rancière, Edelman, and Hartman—Democratic Anarchy polemically declares that there has never been, nor can there ever be, a realized democracy in the U.S. because democracy always depends on the hierarchical institution of a formal order by one part of the population over another. Engaging with an expansive corpus of American literature and art (Harriet Jacobs, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louis Zukofsky, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Nari Ward, Ocean Vuong, and Safiya Sinclair), Democratic Anarchy argues that many liberal concepts and institutions are in fact structurally opposed to democratic equality because they depend on regulating what can appear and in what form.

By focusing on works that disrupt this regulatory impulse, Scully shows how rhetorical strate­gies of interruption, excess, and disorder figure the anarchic equality that inegalitarian fantasies of democracy disavow. Democratic Anarchy develops a rigorous theory of equality that refuses to repeat the inequalities against which it positions itself, and it does so by turning to moments of resistance—both aesthetic and political—inaugurated by the equality that inheres in and antago­nizes the order of things.

A dramatic and necessary rethinking of the meaning of Democracy

Democratic Anarchy grapples with an uncomfortable but obvious truth inimical to democracy: both aesthetics and politics depend on the structuring antagonism of inclusion and exclusion. Yet in Democratic Anarchy, Matthew Scully asks, how can “the people” be represented in a way that acknowledges what remains unrepresentable? What would it mean to face up to the constitutive exclusions that haunt U.S. democracy and its anxious fantasies of equality?

Synthesizing a broad range of theoretical traditions and interlocutors—including Lacan, Rancière, Edelman, and Hartman—Democratic Anarchy polemically declares that there has never been, nor can there ever be, a realized democracy in the U.S. because democracy always depends on the hierarchical institution of a formal order by one part of the population over another. Engaging with an expansive corpus of American literature and art (Harriet Jacobs, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louis Zukofsky, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Nari Ward, Ocean Vuong, and Safiya Sinclair), Democratic Anarchy argues that many liberal concepts and institutions are in fact structurally opposed to democratic equality because they depend on regulating what can appear and in what form.

By focusing on works that disrupt this regulatory impulse, Scully shows how rhetorical strate­gies of interruption, excess, and disorder figure the anarchic equality that inegalitarian fantasies of democracy disavow. Democratic Anarchy develops a rigorous theory of equality that refuses to repeat the inequalities against which it positions itself, and it does so by turning to moments of resistance—both aesthetic and political—inaugurated by the equality that inheres in and antago­nizes the order of things.

Drawing on sources as diverse as Supreme Court decisions, nightclub comedy, congressional records, and cultural theory, Obscene Gestures explores the many contradictory vectors of twentieth-century moralist controversies surrounding literary and artistic works from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer to those of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Kathy Acker, Robert Mapplethorpe, 2 Live Crew, Tony Kushner, and others. Patrick S. Lawrence dives into notorious obscenity debates to reconsider the divergent afterlives of artworks that were challenged or banned over their taboo sexual content to reveal how these controversies affected their critical reception and commercial success in ways that were often determined at least in part by racial, gender, or sexual stereotypes and pernicious ethnographic reading practices.

Starting with early postwar touchstone cases and continuing through the civil rights, feminist, and LGBTQ+ movements, Lawrence demonstrates on one level that breaking sexual taboos in literary and cultural works often comes with cultural cachet and increased sales. At the same time, these benefits are distributed unequally, leading to the persistence of exclusive hierarchies and inequalities.

Obscene Gestures takes its bearings from recent studies of the role of obscenity in literary history and canon formation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, extending their insights into the postwar period when broad legal latitude for obscenity was established but when charges of obscenity still carried immense symbolic and political weight. Moreover, the rise of social justice movements around this time provides necessary context for understanding the application of legal precedents, changes in the publishing industry, and the diversification of the canon of American letters. Obscene Gestures, therefore, advances the study of obscenity to include recent developments in the understanding of race, gender, and sexuality while refining our understanding of late-twentieth-century American literature and political culture.

Drawing on sources as diverse as Supreme Court decisions, nightclub comedy, congressional records, and cultural theory, Obscene Gestures explores the many contradictory vectors of twentieth-century moralist controversies surrounding literary and artistic works from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer to those of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Kathy Acker, Robert Mapplethorpe, 2 Live Crew, Tony Kushner, and others. Patrick S. Lawrence dives into notorious obscenity debates to reconsider the divergent afterlives of artworks that were challenged or banned over their taboo sexual content to reveal how these controversies affected their critical reception and commercial success in ways that were often determined at least in part by racial, gender, or sexual stereotypes and pernicious ethnographic reading practices.

Starting with early postwar touchstone cases and continuing through the civil rights, feminist, and LGBTQ+ movements, Lawrence demonstrates on one level that breaking sexual taboos in literary and cultural works often comes with cultural cachet and increased sales. At the same time, these benefits are distributed unequally, leading to the persistence of exclusive hierarchies and inequalities.

Obscene Gestures takes its bearings from recent studies of the role of obscenity in literary history and canon formation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, extending their insights into the postwar period when broad legal latitude for obscenity was established but when charges of obscenity still carried immense symbolic and political weight. Moreover, the rise of social justice movements around this time provides necessary context for understanding the application of legal precedents, changes in the publishing industry, and the diversification of the canon of American letters. Obscene Gestures, therefore, advances the study of obscenity to include recent developments in the understanding of race, gender, and sexuality while refining our understanding of late-twentieth-century American literature and political culture.

Throughout the 1950s, a coalition of developers, politicians, and planners bulldozed vast areas of land deemed “slums” or “blighted” to make way for freeways, public and private housing projects, cultural centers, and skyscrapers. While the program was national, New York was ground zero, and the demolition and monumental reconstruction of the city created a distinctive urban sensorium, rooted in the new segregated landscapes of prosperous white private space and poor black public space.

Novel Shocks situates these landscapes at the center of the midcentury novel, arguing that James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Patricia Highsmith, Ayn Rand, William Burroughs, Sylvia Plath, and Warren Miller all registered these new urban spaces as traumatic “shocks” that required new aesthetic forms. Rejecting older shock-based modernisms, these novelists forged a new modernism, which reimagined shock as a therapeutic force that would create a more flexible, self-reliant, and resilient subject that would nourish neoliberalism’s roots. In offering a cultural prehistory of neoliberalism, Novel Shocks resituates the Cold War novel as a key archive for understanding neoliberalism’s emergence and offers a more materialist and historically grounded account of neoliberalism’s subjective, affective, and ideological structures.

This volume assembles for the first time a staggering multiplicity of reflections and readings of John Fante’s 1939 classic, Ask the Dust, a true testament to the work’s present and future impact.

The contributors to this work—writers, critics, fans, scholars, screenwriters, directors, and others—analyze the provocative set of diaspora tensions informing Fante’s masterpiece that distinguish it from those accounts of earlier East Coast migrations and minglings. A must-read for aficionados of L.A. fiction and new migration literature, John Fante’s “Ask the Dust”: A Joining of Voices and Views is destined for landmark status as the first volume of Fante studies to reveal the novel’s evolving intertextualities and intersectionalities.

Contributors: Miriam Amico, Charles Bukowski, Stephen Cooper, Giovanna DiLello, John Fante, Valerio Ferme, Teresa Fiore, Daniel Gardner, Philippe Garnier, Robert Guffey, Ryan Holiday, Jan Louter, Chiara Mazzucchelli, Meagan Meylor, J’aime Morrison, Nathan Rabin, Alan Rifkin, Suzanne Manizza Roszak, Danny Shain, Robert Towne, Joel Williams

This volume assembles for the first time a staggering multiplicity of reflections and readings of John Fante’s 1939 classic, Ask the Dust, a true testament to the work’s present and future impact.

The contributors to this work—writers, critics, fans, scholars, screenwriters, directors, and others—analyze the provocative set of diaspora tensions informing Fante’s masterpiece that distinguish it from those accounts of earlier East Coast migrations and minglings. A must-read for aficionados of L.A. fiction and new migration literature, John Fante’s “Ask the Dust”: A Joining of Voices and Views is destined for landmark status as the first volume of Fante studies to reveal the novel’s evolving intertextualities and intersectionalities.

Contributors: Miriam Amico, Charles Bukowski, Stephen Cooper, Giovanna DiLello, John Fante, Valerio Ferme, Teresa Fiore, Daniel Gardner, Philippe Garnier, Robert Guffey, Ryan Holiday, Jan Louter, Chiara Mazzucchelli, Meagan Meylor, J’aime Morrison, Nathan Rabin, Alan Rifkin, Suzanne Manizza Roszak, Danny Shain, Robert Towne, Joel Williams

Throughout the 1950s, a coalition of developers, politicians, and planners bulldozed vast areas of land deemed “slums” or “blighted” to make way for freeways, public and private housing projects, cultural centers, and skyscrapers. While the program was national, New York was ground zero, and the demolition and monumental reconstruction of the city created a distinctive urban sensorium, rooted in the new segregated landscapes of prosperous white private space and poor black public space.

Novel Shocks situates these landscapes at the center of the midcentury novel, arguing that James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Patricia Highsmith, Ayn Rand, William Burroughs, Sylvia Plath, and Warren Miller all registered these new urban spaces as traumatic “shocks” that required new aesthetic forms. Rejecting older shock-based modernisms, these novelists forged a new modernism, which reimagined shock as a therapeutic force that would create a more flexible, self-reliant, and resilient subject that would nourish neoliberalism’s roots. In offering a cultural prehistory of neoliberalism, Novel Shocks resituates the Cold War novel as a key archive for understanding neoliberalism’s emergence and offers a more materialist and historically grounded account of neoliberalism’s subjective, affective, and ideological structures.

When does racial description become racism? Critical race studies has not come up with good answers to this question because it has overemphasized the visuality of race. According to dominant theories of racial formation, we see race on bodies and persons and then link those perceptions to unjust practices of racial inequality. Racial Worldmaking argues that we do not just see race. We are taught when, where, and how to notice race by a set of narrative and interpretive strategies. These strategies are named “racial worldmaking” because they get us to notice race not just at the level of the biological representation of bodies or the social categorization of persons. Rather, they get us to embed race into our expectations for how the world operates. As Mark C. Jerng shows us, these strategies find their most powerful expression in popular genre fiction: science fiction, romance, and fantasy.

Taking up the work of H.G. Wells, Margaret Mitchell, Samuel Delany, Philip K. Dick and others, Racial Worldmaking rethinks racial formation in relation to both African American and Asian American studies, as well as how scholars have addressed the relationships between literary representation and racial ideology. In doing so, it engages questions central to our current moment: In what ways do we participate in racist worlds, and how can we imagine and build one that is anti-racist?

Flannery O'Connor and the Mystery of Love interprets O'Connor's perplexing fiction on its own terms. By stepping back from prevailing controversies, this seminal study takes the pleasure of turning to the short stories and novels themselves and forming an impression of them while seeking the answers to such questions as they necessarily suggest themselves. This goal inevitably entails a consideration of the hardness and violence that are the hallmark of O'Connor's genius. That severity for Giannone is inseparable from O'Connor's recounting, in her words, "the action of grace." God's bounty can leave its beneficiaries with some very real handicaps. Grace in this fiction can make the blood run cold; it can do real injury to the body; and it can annihilate.

These devastations paradoxically prepare the characters to receive and give compassion. In its numerous and disturbing forms, the coupling of violence and hardship with divine favor marks the mature nature of O'Connor's Christianity. Suffering is found at heart of love and is its hidden face, agonized and abandoned. This is a love that is an anomaly and an enigma, for the wracked human body holds the glimmer of good omen. Flannery O'Connor and the Mystery of Love traces the evolution of these gaping wounds of love to show how they present the same challenge to her readers as to her characters, all of whom must learn that we are worth what our love is worth.

Focusing on European and American trial fiction since about 1880, Dark Mirror argues that although it is generally animated by a sense of injustice, this literature reflects the virtual collapse in Western culture of the idea of a universal, or "natural," ethical law. From the ancient Greeks to the Victorians, that idea, though powerfully contested by the notion that justice was simply "the interest of the stronger," remained vigorously alive in books as in people’s minds. It thus constituted an alternative to injustice which modern literature, whether its angle is religious, social, or absurdist, rarely presents.

Sterne presents the argument that the tradition of natural law can be adapted to the present condition, a hypothesis that necessitates a view of an international community in which distributive as well as punitive justice is done. Creators of literature, who have so persuasively dramatized the corruptions, cruelties, and absurdities of our time, would then eb called upon to increasingly choose to imagine "just" ways for us to emerge from chaos. Dark Mirror is the first study that combines, comprehensively, the treatment of the historical conflict between idealistic (natural law) and "realistic" or cynical approaches to the idea of justice.

The scope of The Forged Feature is two-fold: to bring together a representative selection of critical essays bearing on Belitt's interests as poet, critic, teacher, and translator; and to furnish an on-going review of his concern with the encoding of languages and the exigencies of their imaginative retrieval. The collection begins with three pieces on the uses of belief, linguistic and place as shaping forces in the concretizing of the literary artifact. The second section of essays examines the fictive medium in terms of a number of "predicaments." The discussion embraces texts such as parables, novels, and autobiographical meoirs covering a broad range of twentieth century talents: Kafka, Borges, V.S. Naipaul, Saul Bellows, and Pablo Neruda. The third section is devoted to the theory and practice of translation developed from Belitt's personal lifetime of experience. Finally, there is a sequence of four essays on the uses of "new physics" of quantum mechanics and its uncanny relevance to the accountability of poetry. Belitt re-evaluates Gerard Manley Hopkins as a "scientific" rather than a priestly crafter of a medium, and touches upon diverse traditions and talents such as Keats, Blake, Stevens, Bishop, Yeats, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Cocteau, W.C. Williams, Michado, Rilke, Wordsworth, and Coleridge.

The brilliant observations collected in this volume are not contained within a specific school of thought and are indefinable within any current fashion- rather, Belitt's frame of reference is literature itself and his essays proceed in a literary, poetic, and individual voice.

When does racial description become racism? Critical race studies has not come up with good answers to this question because it has overemphasized the visuality of race. According to dominant theories of racial formation, we see race on bodies and persons and then link those perceptions to unjust practices of racial inequality. Racial Worldmaking argues that we do not just see race. We are taught when, where, and how to notice race by a set of narrative and interpretive strategies. These strategies are named “racial worldmaking” because they get us to notice race not just at the level of the biological representation of bodies or the social categorization of persons. Rather, they get us to embed race into our expectations for how the world operates. As Mark C. Jerng shows us, these strategies find their most powerful expression in popular genre fiction: science fiction, romance, and fantasy.

Taking up the work of H.G. Wells, Margaret Mitchell, Samuel Delany, Philip K. Dick and others, Racial Worldmaking rethinks racial formation in relation to both African American and Asian American studies, as well as how scholars have addressed the relationships between literary representation and racial ideology. In doing so, it engages questions central to our current moment: In what ways do we participate in racist worlds, and how can we imagine and build one that is anti-racist?

Contemporary readers who look at late-eigteenth-century or nineteenth-century imaginative literature must be struch by a phenomenon that is nearly universal in the period: the powerful presence of sentimentality. An often overlooked fact is that "Sentimentality" not only is a critical term, but is limited to a historical period, from roughly 1700 to the present. Fulweiler's hypothesis is that setimentality in writing has played a crucial part in shaping Western consciousness. As a study of evolution of consciousness-rather than the history of ideas- the argument grows out of the work of philosophers such as Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer, historical philosophers including R.G. Collingwood, Thomas Kuhn, and Michel Foucault, historically oriented literary critics such as Erich Auerbach, and finally the eclectic writing of Owen Barfield.

Fulweiler's hypothesis is that the general consciousness of Western society has undergone severe shocks as a result of the loss-and sometimes repression- of an older human awareness of what anthropologists have called "participation," a term that may be defined as a non-sensory link between human beings and nature. This loss of participation has become gradually apparant with the erosiion of its visible emblems: The Church (with its supporting Law); the extended family, as visualized in feudal, hierarchical theories of society; and finally the nineteeth-century ideal, the nuclear family, with its sacred location, the home, and its glorified Proprietress, the Woman. Sentimentality emerges, then, as a desperate, if often illegitimate, attempt to regain what has been lost, so that imaginative literature of the nineteenth century, even very good literature, is overwhelmed by domestic sentimentality. In the twentieth century it has been heavily, although covertly, affected by a sexual sentimentality of the previous era.

This sentimental journey is traced by focusing on six major writers: Tennyson and Dickens as the giants of Victorian domestic sentimentality, Hopkins and Hardy as transitional figures in whom the sentimental tropes of the ninteenth century are moving toward the sexual sentimentality of the twentieth, Lawrence and Eliot as representatives, in different ways, of that era. This multi-faceted study will be of considerable interest to specialists across a number of fields including literature, history, psychology, philosophy, and religious studies.

Contemporary readers who look at late-eigteenth-century or nineteenth-century imaginative literature must be struch by a phenomenon that is nearly universal in the period: the powerful presence of sentimentality. An often overlooked fact is that "Sentimentality" not only is a critical term, but is limited to a historical period, from roughly 1700 to the present. Fulweiler's hypothesis is that setimentality in writing has played a crucial part in shaping Western consciousness. As a study of evolution of consciousness-rather than the history of ideas- the argument grows out of the work of philosophers such as Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer, historical philosophers including R.G. Collingwood, Thomas Kuhn, and Michel Foucault, historically oriented literary critics such as Erich Auerbach, and finally the eclectic writing of Owen Barfield.

Fulweiler's hypothesis is that the general consciousness of Western society has undergone severe shocks as a result of the loss-and sometimes repression- of an older human awareness of what anthropologists have called "participation," a term that may be defined as a non-sensory link between human beings and nature. This loss of participation has become gradually apparant with the erosiion of its visible emblems: The Church (with its supporting Law); the extended family, as visualized in feudal, hierarchical theories of society; and finally the nineteeth-century ideal, the nuclear family, with its sacred location, the home, and its glorified Proprietress, the Woman. Sentimentality emerges, then, as a desperate, if often illegitimate, attempt to regain what has been lost, so that imaginative literature of the nineteenth century, even very good literature, is overwhelmed by domestic sentimentality. In the twentieth century it has been heavily, although covertly, affected by a sexual sentimentality of the previous era.

This sentimental journey is traced by focusing on six major writers: Tennyson and Dickens as the giants of Victorian domestic sentimentality, Hopkins and Hardy as transitional figures in whom the sentimental tropes of the ninteenth century are moving toward the sexual sentimentality of the twentieth, Lawrence and Eliot as representatives, in different ways, of that era. This multi-faceted study will be of considerable interest to specialists across a number of fields including literature, history, psychology, philosophy, and religious studies.

The scope of The Forged Feature is two-fold: to bring together a representative selection of critical essays bearing on Belitt's interests as poet, critic, teacher, and translator; and to furnish an on-going review of his concern with the encoding of languages and the exigencies of their imaginative retrieval. The collection begins with three pieces on the uses of belief, linguistic and place as shaping forces in the concretizing of the literary artifact. The second section of essays examines the fictive medium in terms of a number of "predicaments." The discussion embraces texts such as parables, novels, and autobiographical meoirs covering a broad range of twentieth century talents: Kafka, Borges, V.S. Naipaul, Saul Bellows, and Pablo Neruda. The third section is devoted to the theory and practice of translation developed from Belitt's personal lifetime of experience. Finally, there is a sequence of four essays on the uses of "new physics" of quantum mechanics and its uncanny relevance to the accountability of poetry. Belitt re-evaluates Gerard Manley Hopkins as a "scientific" rather than a priestly crafter of a medium, and touches upon diverse traditions and talents such as Keats, Blake, Stevens, Bishop, Yeats, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Cocteau, W.C. Williams, Michado, Rilke, Wordsworth, and Coleridge.

The brilliant observations collected in this volume are not contained within a specific school of thought and are indefinable within any current fashion- rather, Belitt's frame of reference is literature itself and his essays proceed in a literary, poetic, and individual voice.

At his death in 1878 William Cullen Bryant had been, for fifty-one years, the chief editor and a principal owner of the New York Evening Post. The paper had been started in 1801 by lawyer William Coleman in association with the Federalist political Alexander Hamilton. In 1826, Coleman hired Bryant as a reporter. Although Coleman may have engaged his services because of his growing distinction as a poet, Bryant was also by then an experienced writer of prose, having published more than fifty critical and familiar essays. He had been both editor of and most frequent writer for the monthly New York Review and the United State Review, and was known widely for his lectures on poetry before the New York Athenaeum. By the time he assumed the direction of the Evening Post after Coleman's death in 1829 he had proved himself, in three annual volumes of the holiday gift book The Talisman, to be proficient in a wit and irony soon reflected in his editorials.

Bryant brought the conservative journal to the support of the Democratic Party of President Andrew Jackson, and held it thereafter to liberal principles, advocating free trade, free labor, and Free Soil. Except for the years from 1829 to 1836, Bryant held the editorial pen largely alone until after the Civil War. Occasional contributors formed a representative roster of leaders in many fields: Charles Francis Adams, Thomas Hart Benton, Francis P. Blair, Salman P. Chase, Thomas Cole, James Fenimore Cooper, Hamilton Fish, Parke Godwin (Bryant's son-in-law), Bret Harte, James K. Paulding, John Randolph, Samule J. Tilden, Martin and John Van Buren, Artemus Ward, Gideon Wlles, Walt Whitman, and Silas Wright. And now and then there were articles by British Parliamentarian Richard Cobden and artist-economist George Harvey, and the French critic Charles Sainte-Beuve.

Bryant's editorials after 1860 suggest separate treatment. The present volume traces the growth of his political and social maturity as he made of a conservative, parochial, small-city newspaper into a national organ which Charles Francis Adams in 1850 called "the best daily journal in the United States."

At his death in 1878 William Cullen Bryant had been, for fifty-one years, the chief editor and a principal owner of the New York Evening Post. The paper had been started in 1801 by lawyer William Coleman in association with the Federalist political Alexander Hamilton. In 1826, Coleman hired Bryant as a reporter. Although Coleman may have engaged his services because of his growing distinction as a poet, Bryant was also by then an experienced writer of prose, having published more than fifty critical and familiar essays. He had been both editor of and most frequent writer for the monthly New York Review and the United State Review, and was known widely for his lectures on poetry before the New York Athenaeum. By the time he assumed the direction of the Evening Post after Coleman's death in 1829 he had proved himself, in three annual volumes of the holiday gift book The Talisman, to be proficient in a wit and irony soon reflected in his editorials.

Bryant brought the conservative journal to the support of the Democratic Party of President Andrew Jackson, and held it thereafter to liberal principles, advocating free trade, free labor, and Free Soil. Except for the years from 1829 to 1836, Bryant held the editorial pen largely alone until after the Civil War. Occasional contributors formed a representative roster of leaders in many fields: Charles Francis Adams, Thomas Hart Benton, Francis P. Blair, Salman P. Chase, Thomas Cole, James Fenimore Cooper, Hamilton Fish, Parke Godwin (Bryant's son-in-law), Bret Harte, James K. Paulding, John Randolph, Samule J. Tilden, Martin and John Van Buren, Artemus Ward, Gideon Wlles, Walt Whitman, and Silas Wright. And now and then there were articles by British Parliamentarian Richard Cobden and artist-economist George Harvey, and the French critic Charles Sainte-Beuve.

Bryant's editorials after 1860 suggest separate treatment. The present volume traces the growth of his political and social maturity as he made of a conservative, parochial, small-city newspaper into a national organ which Charles Francis Adams in 1850 called "the best daily journal in the United States."

The twenty-five original essays in this remarkable book constitute both a state of the art survey of Dante scholarship and a manifesto for new understandings of one of the world’s great poets.

The fruit of an historic conference called by the Dante Society of America, the essays confront a range of important questions. What theories, methods, and issues are unique to Dante scholarship? How are they changing? What is the essence of the distinctive American Dante tradition? Why—and how—do we read Dante in today’s global, postmodern culture?

From John Ahern on the first copies of the Commedia to Peter Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff on Dante after modernism, the essays shed brilliant new light on Dante’s texts, his world, and what we make of his legacy.

The contributors: John Ahern, H. Wayne Storey, Guglielmo Gorni, Teodolinda Barolini, Gary P. Cestaro, Lino Pertile, F. Regina Psaki, Steven Botterill, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Alison Cornish, Robert M. Durling, Manuele Gragnolati, Giuliana Carugati, Susan Noakes, Zygmunt Baranski, Christopher Kleinhenz, Ronald L. Martinez, Ronald Herzman, Amilcare Iannucci, Albert Russell Ascoli, Michelangelo Picone, Jessica Levenstein, David Wallace, Piero Boitani, Peter Hawkins, and Rachel Jacoff.

The twenty-five original essays in this remarkable book constitute both a state of the art survey of Dante scholarship and a manifesto for new understandings of one of the world’s great poets.

The fruit of an historic conference called by the Dante Society of America, the essays confront a range of important questions. What theories, methods, and issues are unique to Dante scholarship? How are they changing? What is the essence of the distinctive American Dante tradition? Why—and how—do we read Dante in today’s global, postmodern culture?

From John Ahern on the first copies of the Commedia to Peter Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff on Dante after modernism, the essays shed brilliant new light on Dante’s texts, his world, and what we make of his legacy.

The contributors: John Ahern, H. Wayne Storey, Guglielmo Gorni, Teodolinda Barolini, Gary P. Cestaro, Lino Pertile, F. Regina Psaki, Steven Botterill, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Alison Cornish, Robert M. Durling, Manuele Gragnolati, Giuliana Carugati, Susan Noakes, Zygmunt Baranski, Christopher Kleinhenz, Ronald L. Martinez, Ronald Herzman, Amilcare Iannucci, Albert Russell Ascoli, Michelangelo Picone, Jessica Levenstein, David Wallace, Piero Boitani, Peter Hawkins, and Rachel Jacoff.

The work of a master critic writing at the peak of his powers, this magisterial book draws on speech act theory, as it originated with J. L. Austin and was further developed by Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, to investigate the many dimensions of doing things with words in James’s fiction.

Three modes of speech act occur in James’s novels. First, James’s writing of his fictions is performative. He puts on paper words that have the power to raise in the reader the phantoms of imaginary persons. Second, James’s writing does things with words that do other things in their turn, including conferring on the reader responsibility for further judgment and action: for example, teaching James’s novels or writing about them. Finally, the narrators and characters in James’s fictions utter speech acts that are forms of doing things with words— promises, declarations, excuses, denials, acts of bearing witness, lies, decisions publicly attested, and the like. The action of each work by James, he shows, is brought about by its own idiosyncratic repertoire of speech acts.

In careful readings of six major examples, “The Aspern Papers,” The Portrait of a Lady, The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, and The Sense of the Past, Miller demonstrates the value of speech act theory for reading literature.

The work of a master critic writing at the peak of his powers, this magisterial book draws on speech act theory, as it originated with J. L. Austin and was further developed by Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, to investigate the many dimensions of doing things with words in James’s fiction.

Three modes of speech act occur in James’s novels. First, James’s writing of his fictions is performative. He puts on paper words that have the power to raise in the reader the phantoms of imaginary persons. Second, James’s writing does things with words that do other things in their turn, including conferring on the reader responsibility for further judgment and action: for example, teaching James’s novels or writing about them. Finally, the narrators and characters in James’s fictions utter speech acts that are forms of doing things with words— promises, declarations, excuses, denials, acts of bearing witness, lies, decisions publicly attested, and the like. The action of each work by James, he shows, is brought about by its own idiosyncratic repertoire of speech acts.

In careful readings of six major examples, “The Aspern Papers,” The Portrait of a Lady, The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, and The Sense of the Past, Miller demonstrates the value of speech act theory for reading literature.

What are we talking about when we talk about sovereignty? Is it about formal legitimacy or practical authority? Does it require the ability to control the flow of people or goods across a border; is it primarily a principle of international recognition; or does its essence lie in the power to regulate the lives of a state’s citizens? Political theorists, historians, scholars of international relations, lawyers, anthropologists, literary critics—all approach the dilemmas of sovereign power with a mixture of urgency and frustration.

In On Lingering and Being Last, Jonathan Elmer argues that the logic of sovereignty that emerged in early modern Europe and that limits our thinking today must be understood as a fundamentally racialized logic, first visible in the New World. The modern concept of sovereignty is based on a trope of personification, the conjunction of individual and collective identities. In Grotius, Hobbes, and others, a fiction of sovereign autonomy enabled states to be personified as individuals, as bodies politic, even as individual humans could be imagined as miniature states. The contradictions of this logic were fully revealed only in the New World, as writers ranging from Aphra Behn to Thomas Jefferson and Herman Melville demonstrate.

The racialized sovereign figures examined in On Lingering and Being Last—the slave king Oroonoko, the last chief Logan, and their avatars—are always at once a person and a people. They embody the connection between the individual and the collectivity, and thereby reveal that the volatile work of sovereign personification takes place in a new world constituted both by concepts of equality, homogeneity, and symmetry—by an ideal of liberal individualism—and by the realities of racial domination and ideology in the era of colonial expansion. The conjunction of the individual, race, and New World territorialization, Elmer argues, is key to understanding the deepest strata in the political imagination of Atlantic modernity.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, did symbolic as well as literal damage. A trace of this cultural shock echoes in the American idiom “9/11”: a bare name-date conveying both a trauma (the unspeakable happened then) and a claim on our knowledge. In the first of the two interlinked essays making up The Rhetoric of Terror, Marc Redfield proposes the notion of “virtual trauma” to describe the cultural wound that this name-date both deflects and relays. Virtual trauma describes the shock of an event at once terribly real and utterly mediated. In consequence, a tormented self-reflexivity has tended to characterize representations of 9/11 in texts, discussions, and films, such as World Trade Center and United 93.

In the second half of the book, Redfield examines the historical and philosophical infrastructure of the notion of “war on terror.” Redfield argues that the declaration of war on terror is the exemplary postmodern sovereign speech act: it unleashes war as terror and terror as war, while remaining a crazed, even in a certain sense fictional performative utterance. Only a pseudosovereign—the executive officer of the world’s superpower—could have declared this absolute, phantasmatic, yet terribly damaging war. Though politicized terror and absolute war have their roots in the French Revolution and the emergence of the modern nation-state, Redfield suggests that the idea of a war on terror relays the complex, spectral afterlife of sovereignty in an era of biopower, global capital, and telecommunication.

A moving, wide-ranging, and rigorous meditation on the cultural tragedy of our era, The Rhetoric of Terror also unfolds as an act of mourning for Jacques Derrida. Derrida’s groundbreaking philosophical analysis of iterability—iterability as the exposure to repetition with a difference elsewhere that makes all technics, signification, and psychic life possible—helps us understand why questions of mediation and aesthetics so rapidly become so fraught in our culture; why efforts to repress our essential political, psychic, and ontological vulnerability generate recursive spasms of violence; why ethical living-together involves uninsurable acts of hospitality. The Rhetoric of Terror closes with an affirmation of eirenic cosmopolitanism.

Reading Melville is not only reading. Reading Melville means being already engaged in the abyssal process of reading reading. Reading what reading is and what reading does.

With Melville, Prophecies of Leviathan argues that reading, beyond its apparent linearity, is essentially prophetic, not only because Moby Dick, for example, may appear to be full of unexpected prophecies (Ishmael seems to foretell a "Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States" followed by a "bloody battle in Afghanistan") but also, and more deeply, because reading itself is a prophetic experience that Melville captured in a unique way.

Reading, according to Melville, might just be the prophecy of the text to come. This apparently tautological view has great consequences for the theory of literature and its relation to politics. As Szendy suggests, the beheading of Melville's "Leviathan" (which, Ishmael says, "is the text") should be read against Hobbes's sovereign body politic. Szendy's reading of Melville urges us to revisit Jacques Derrida's all too famous sentence: "There is no hors-texte." And it also urges us-as the preface to this English edition makes clear-to reflect on the (Christian) categories that we apply to the text: its life, death, and, above all, afterlife or suicide. The infinite finitude of the text: that is what reading is about.

In his brilliant and thorough afterword, Gil Anidjar situates Prophecies of Leviathan among Szendy's other works and shows how the seemingly tautological self-prophecy really announces a new "ipsology," a "pluralization of the self" through a "narcissism of the other thing."

What are we talking about when we talk about sovereignty? Is it about formal legitimacy or practical authority? Does it require the ability to control the flow of people or goods across a border; is it primarily a principle of international recognition; or does its essence lie in the power to regulate the lives of a state’s citizens? Political theorists, historians, scholars of international relations, lawyers, anthropologists, literary critics—all approach the dilemmas of sovereign power with a mixture of urgency and frustration.

In On Lingering and Being Last, Jonathan Elmer argues that the logic of sovereignty that emerged in early modern Europe and that limits our thinking today must be understood as a fundamentally racialized logic, first visible in the New World. The modern concept of sovereignty is based on a trope of personification, the conjunction of individual and collective identities. In Grotius, Hobbes, and others, a fiction of sovereign autonomy enabled states to be personified as individuals, as bodies politic, even as individual humans could be imagined as miniature states. The contradictions of this logic were fully revealed only in the New World, as writers ranging from Aphra Behn to Thomas Jefferson and Herman Melville demonstrate.

The racialized sovereign figures examined in On Lingering and Being Last—the slave king Oroonoko, the last chief Logan, and their avatars—are always at once a person and a people. They embody the connection between the individual and the collectivity, and thereby reveal that the volatile work of sovereign personification takes place in a new world constituted both by concepts of equality, homogeneity, and symmetry—by an ideal of liberal individualism—and by the realities of racial domination and ideology in the era of colonial expansion. The conjunction of the individual, race, and New World territorialization, Elmer argues, is key to understanding the deepest strata in the political imagination of Atlantic modernity.

The writer Giuseppe Prezzolini said that Italian immigrants left behind tears and sweat but not “words,” making their lives in America mostly in silence, their memories private and stories untold.

In this innovative portrait of the Italian-American experience, these lives are no longer hidden. Ilaria Serra offers the first comprehensive study of a largely ignored legacy—the autobiographies written by immigrants.

Here she looks closely at fifty-eight representative works written during the high tide of Italian migration.
Scouring archives, discovering diaries, and memoirs in private houses and forgotten drawers, Serra recovers the voices of the first generation—bootblacks and poets, film directors and farmers, miners, anarchists, and
seamstresses—compelled to tell their stories. Mostly unpublished, often thickly accented, these tales of ordinary men and women are explored in nuanced detail, organized to reflect how they illuminate the realities of
work, survival, identity, and change.

Moving between history and literature, Serra presents each as the imaginative record of a self in the making and the collective story of the journey to selfhood that is the heart of the immigrant experience.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, did symbolic as well as literal damage. A trace of this cultural shock echoes in the American idiom “9/11”: a bare name-date conveying both a trauma (the unspeakable happened then) and a claim on our knowledge. In the first of the two interlinked essays making up The Rhetoric of Terror, Marc Redfield proposes the notion of “virtual trauma” to describe the cultural wound that this name-date both deflects and relays. Virtual trauma describes the shock of an event at once terribly real and utterly mediated. In consequence, a tormented self-reflexivity has tended to characterize representations of 9/11 in texts, discussions, and films, such as World Trade Center and United 93.

In the second half of the book, Redfield examines the historical and philosophical infrastructure of the notion of “war on terror.” Redfield argues that the declaration of war on terror is the exemplary postmodern sovereign speech act: it unleashes war as terror and terror as war, while remaining a crazed, even in a certain sense fictional performative utterance. Only a pseudosovereign—the executive officer of the world’s superpower—could have declared this absolute, phantasmatic, yet terribly damaging war. Though politicized terror and absolute war have their roots in the French Revolution and the emergence of the modern nation-state, Redfield suggests that the idea of a war on terror relays the complex, spectral afterlife of sovereignty in an era of biopower, global capital, and telecommunication.

A moving, wide-ranging, and rigorous meditation on the cultural tragedy of our era, The Rhetoric of Terror also unfolds as an act of mourning for Jacques Derrida. Derrida’s groundbreaking philosophical analysis of iterability—iterability as the exposure to repetition with a difference elsewhere that makes all technics, signification, and psychic life possible—helps us understand why questions of mediation and aesthetics so rapidly become so fraught in our culture; why efforts to repress our essential political, psychic, and ontological vulnerability generate recursive spasms of violence; why ethical living-together involves uninsurable acts of hospitality. The Rhetoric of Terror closes with an affirmation of eirenic cosmopolitanism.

Reading Melville is not only reading. Reading Melville means being already engaged in the abyssal process of reading reading. Reading what reading is and what reading does.

With Melville, Prophecies of Leviathan argues that reading, beyond its apparent linearity, is essentially prophetic, not only because Moby Dick, for example, may appear to be full of unexpected prophecies (Ishmael seems to foretell a "Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States" followed by a "bloody battle in Afghanistan") but also, and more deeply, because reading itself is a prophetic experience that Melville captured in a unique way.

Reading, according to Melville, might just be the prophecy of the text to come. This apparently tautological view has great consequences for the theory of literature and its relation to politics. As Szendy suggests, the beheading of Melville's "Leviathan" (which, Ishmael says, "is the text") should be read against Hobbes's sovereign body politic. Szendy's reading of Melville urges us to revisit Jacques Derrida's all too famous sentence: "There is no hors-texte." And it also urges us-as the preface to this English edition makes clear-to reflect on the (Christian) categories that we apply to the text: its life, death, and, above all, afterlife or suicide. The infinite finitude of the text: that is what reading is about.

In his brilliant and thorough afterword, Gil Anidjar situates Prophecies of Leviathan among Szendy's other works and shows how the seemingly tautological self-prophecy really announces a new "ipsology," a "pluralization of the self" through a "narcissism of the other thing."

The writer Giuseppe Prezzolini said that Italian immigrants left behind tears and sweat but not “words,” making their lives in America mostly in silence, their memories private and stories untold.

In this innovative portrait of the Italian-American experience, these lives are no longer hidden. Ilaria Serra offers the first comprehensive study of a largely ignored legacy—the autobiographies written by immigrants.

Here she looks closely at fifty-eight representative works written during the high tide of Italian migration.
Scouring archives, discovering diaries, and memoirs in private houses and forgotten drawers, Serra recovers the voices of the first generation—bootblacks and poets, film directors and farmers, miners, anarchists, and
seamstresses—compelled to tell their stories. Mostly unpublished, often thickly accented, these tales of ordinary men and women are explored in nuanced detail, organized to reflect how they illuminate the realities of
work, survival, identity, and change.

Moving between history and literature, Serra presents each as the imaginative record of a self in the making and the collective story of the journey to selfhood that is the heart of the immigrant experience.

This book argues that we can no longer envision a political system that might practically displace democracy or, more accurately, global democratic state capitalism. Democracy has become fundamental: It extends deeper and deeper into everyday life; it grounds and limits our political thought and values. That is the sense in which we do indeed live at history’s end. But this end is not a happy one, because the system that we now have does not satisfy tests that we can legitimately put to it.

In this situation, it is important to come to new terms with the fact that literature, at least until about 1945, was predominantly hostile to political democracy. Literature’s deep-seated conservative, counterdemocratic tendencies, along with its capacity to make important distinctions among political, cultural, and experiential democracies and its capacity to uncover hidden, nonpolitical democracies in everyday life, is now a resource not just for cultural conservatives but for all those who take a critical attitude toward the current political, cultural, and economic structures. Literature, and certain novelists in particular, helps us not so much to imagine social possibilities beyond democracy as to understand how life might be lived both in and outside democratic state capitalism.

Drawing on political theory, intellectual history, and the techniques of close reading, Against Democracy offers new accounts of the ethos of refusing democracy, of literary criticism’s contribution to that ethos, and of the history of conservatism, as well as innovative interpretations of a range of writers, including Tocqueville, Disraeli, George Eliot, E. M. Forster, and Saul Bellow.

This book argues that we can no longer envision a political system that might practically displace democracy or, more accurately, global democratic state capitalism. Democracy has become fundamental: It extends deeper and deeper into everyday life; it grounds and limits our political thought and values. That is the sense in which we do indeed live at history’s end. But this end is not a happy one, because the system that we now have does not satisfy tests that we can legitimately put to it.

In this situation, it is important to come to new terms with the fact that literature, at least until about 1945, was predominantly hostile to political democracy. Literature’s deep-seated conservative, counterdemocratic tendencies, along with its capacity to make important distinctions among political, cultural, and experiential democracies and its capacity to uncover hidden, nonpolitical democracies in everyday life, is now a resource not just for cultural conservatives but for all those who take a critical attitude toward the current political, cultural, and economic structures. Literature, and certain novelists in particular, helps us not so much to imagine social possibilities beyond democracy as to understand how life might be lived both in and outside democratic state capitalism.

Drawing on political theory, intellectual history, and the techniques of close reading, Against Democracy offers new accounts of the ethos of refusing democracy, of literary criticism’s contribution to that ethos, and of the history of conservatism, as well as innovative interpretations of a range of writers, including Tocqueville, Disraeli, George Eliot, E. M. Forster, and Saul Bellow.

"…Elizabeth M. Kerr has, with the publication of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha: 'A Kind of Keystone in the Universe,' completed a comprehensive examination of Faulkner's mythical county…this latest work deals with the 'symbolic values related to the themes of the separate narratives and to the encompassing mythology.' In successive chapters, Kerr examines (1) recurrent symbols and archetypes in Faulkner's fiction; (2) mythology in the modern world, the South, and Yoknapatawpha; and (3) 'the basic Christian humanism which underlies Williams Faulkner's existential focus on the human condition' - most specifically as it relates to Time, Motion, and Change. The book is scholarly, well written, and carefully organized…Highly recommended."—Choice

"Aiming for the universal in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction, this book reads somewhat like an annotated bibliography, or three bibliographies: one on symbols in Yoknapatawpha, citing (copiously) dissertations, articles, and books on symbolism in general and Faulkner's own symbols; one on various myths Kerr and other critics have noticed in Yoknapatawpha

In 1977, Bennington College alumna Edith Barbour Andrews established the Ben Belitt Lectureships in gratitude to her teacher Ben Belitt and dedicated the publication of the lectures (in the form of chapbooks) to the memory of William Troy, another of her beloved teachers. The collection, published here in one volume, comprises lectures by some of the most inspiring writers and keenest critics of our time. In his introduciton to The Ordering Mirror, Phillip Lopate contrasts the anticipations and the audience/lecturer dynamic inherent in attending yearly lecture, with the experience of reading them, and the opportunity for reflection and comparison. Lopate summarizes that, "It is enough to appreciate that we are watching masters of the game of essay-writing, who, even as they comment on the masterpieces of other writers, practice their own wizardry."

The volume includes:

George Steiner, "The Uncommon Reader" (1978)
Frank Kermode, "Divination" (1979)
Harold Bloom, "To the Tally of My Soul: Whitman's Image of Voice" (1980)
Denis Donoghue, "The Politics of Modern Criticism" (1981)
Irving Howe, "The Making of a Critic" (1982)
Richard Ellman, "The Uses of Decadence: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce" (1983)
Bernard Malamud, "Long Work, Short Life" (1984)
Ben Belitt, "Literature and Belief: Three 'Spiritual Exercises'" (1985)
Saul Bellow, "Summations" (1987)
Hugh Kenner, "Magics and Spells (about curses, charms, and riddles)" (1987)
Richard Rorty, "The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on Cruelty" (1988)
Rene Girard, "Collective Violence and Sacrifice in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar" (1989)
Nadine Gordimer, "Three in a Bed: Fiction, Morals and Politics" (1990)
Seamus Heaney, "Dylan the Durable?: On Dylan Thomas" (1992)
Cynthia Ozick, "What Henry James Knew" (1992)

Many biographies of John D. Rockefeller and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. have been compiled- some have used bits of the original correspondence presented here and tried to show opposing interests between John D. Rockefeller and his son. Still others were written without correspondence at all. This collection of never-before-published letters traces the history of the transfer of the Rockefeller fortune over the course of fifty years. It illustrates how the endowment was bestowed from Senior to Junior with respect, sound advice, and with a mutual trust between father and son.

The letters also reveal far more than the business side of entrusting the Rockefeller fortune to the younger generation. The misives are filled with news of family matters and personal wishes constituting a record of the Rockefeller family values which, in turn, sponsored the philantrophies of Junior. Outlined in these letters is the conception for the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, and the General Education Board. Later would follow the realization of the Fort Tryon Park, the Rockefeller Center, Riverside Church, and the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg. Junior's holdings peaked in 1928 at 5 million and his dedication to public parks, and institutions around the world absorbed a considerable portion of his wealth.

Ernst's introduction reflects on five themes which run continuously throughout the letters: the respect and love among the members of the family, a father's precautions to his maturing son, the son's willingness to accept his father's precepts and examples, the son's conscious assumption of the responsibilities of the bequeathed fortune, and overriding faith in a benevolent God. These themes continually come together to form the outline of a philosophy of life behind the Rockefeller legacy, as when Senior writes: "I am indeed blessed beyond measure in having a son whom I can trust to do this most particular and most important work. Go carefully. Be conservative. Be sure you are right- and then do not be afraid to give out, as your heart prompts you, and as the Lord inspires you."

In 1580 Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) presented a literary project to the public the type of wich had never before been introduced- a collection of Essays with himself as subject. Never before had a writer attempted a literary self-portrait, and in so doing Montaigne named and defined a new literary form, the essay.

Brush's critical study of Essays examines the complex process of writing a self-portrait and showing the ways in which it is an entirely differnt enterprise from writing an autobiography. The author discusses how Montaigne revealed his "mind in motion," and the most remarkable feature of that mind, skepticism. He treats Montaigne's development of a conversational voice and explicates how Montaigne's intense self-examination became an evolutionary process which had consequences in his life and literature. The work concludes with a discussion of how Montaigne's self-assigned task of introspection included the formulation of a view of humanity and its ethics.

Brush's work fills a gap in scholarship by critically examining the essential loci of the Essays, namely, the creation of a literary self-portrait. The book makes its points convincingly because of Brush's intimacy and command of the essays. Montaigne's works are cited in English translation, and the subject is presented in terms accessible to the non-specialist.

This innovative book charts what has been a largely unexplored literary landscape, looking at the work of such diverse writers as the gens de couleur libre poets of antebellum New Orleans, Kate Chopin, Mark Twain, Carson McCullers, Margaret Mitchell, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and John Kennedy Toole. Haddox shows that Catholicism and its Church have always been a presence, albeit in different ways, in the southern cultural tradition.

For some, Catholicism has been associated with miscegenation and with the political aspirations of African-Americans; for others, it has served as the model for the feudal and patriarchal society that some southern whites sought to establish; for still others, it has presented a gorgeous aesthetic spectacle associated with decadence and homoeroticism; and for still others, it has marked a quotidian, do-it-yourself "lifestyle" attractive for its lack of concern with southern anxieties about honor.

By focusing on the shifting and contradictory ways Catholicism has signified within southern literature and culture, Fears and Fascinations contributes to a more nuanced understanding of American and southern literary and cultural history.

Granville Hicks was one of America's most influential literary and social critics. Along with Malcolm Cowley, F. O. Matthiessen, Max Eastman, Alfred Kazin, and others, he shaped the cultural landscape of 20th-century America.

In 1946 Hicks published Small Town, a portrait of life in the rural crossroads of Grafton, N.Y., where he had moved after being fired from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for his left-wing political views. In this book, he combines a kind of hand-crafted ethnographic research with personal reflections on the qualities of small town life that were being threatened by spreading cities and suburbs. He eloquently tried to define the essential qualities of small town community life and to link them to the best features of American culture. The book sparked numerous articles and debates in a baby-boom America nervously on the move.

Long out of print, this classic of cultural criticism speaks powerfully to a new generation seeking to reconnect with a sense of place in American life, both rural and urban. An unaffected, deeply felt portrait of one such place by one of the best American critics, it should find a new home as a vivid reminder of what we have lost-and what we might still be able to protect.

Humanitarianism has a narrative problem. Far too often, aid to Africa is envisioned through a tale of Western heroes saving African sufferers. While labeling white savior narratives has become a familiar gesture, it doesn’t tell us much about the story as story. Humanitarian Fictions aims to understand the workings of humanitarian literature, as they engage with and critique narratives of Africa.

Overlapping with but distinct from human rights, humanitarianism centers on a relationship of assistance, focusing less on rights than on needs, less on legal frameworks than moral ones, less on the problem than on the nonstate solution. Tracing the white savior narrative back to religious missionaries of the nineteenth century, Humanitarian Fictions reveals the influence of religious thought on seemingly secular institutions and uncovers a spiritual, collectivist streak in the discourse of humanity.

Because the humanitarian model of care transcends the boundaries of the state, and its networks touch much of the globe, Humanitarian Fictions redraws the boundaries of literary classification based on a shared problem space rather than a shared national space. The book maps a transnational vein of Anglophone literature about Africa that features missionaries, humanitarians, and their so-called beneficiaries. Putting humanitarian thought in conversation with postcolonial critique, this book brings together African, British, and U.S. writers typically read within separate traditions. Paustian shows how the novel—with its profound sensitivity to narrative—can enrich the critique of white saviorism while also imagining alternatives that give African agency its due.

Humanitarianism has a narrative problem. Far too often, aid to Africa is envisioned through a tale of Western heroes saving African sufferers. While labeling white savior narratives has become a familiar gesture, it doesn’t tell us much about the story as story. Humanitarian Fictions aims to understand the workings of humanitarian literature, as they engage with and critique narratives of Africa.

Overlapping with but distinct from human rights, humanitarianism centers on a relationship of assistance, focusing less on rights than on needs, less on legal frameworks than moral ones, less on the problem than on the nonstate solution. Tracing the white savior narrative back to religious missionaries of the nineteenth century, Humanitarian Fictions reveals the influence of religious thought on seemingly secular institutions and uncovers a spiritual, collectivist streak in the discourse of humanity.

Because the humanitarian model of care transcends the boundaries of the state, and its networks touch much of the globe, Humanitarian Fictions redraws the boundaries of literary classification based on a shared problem space rather than a shared national space. The book maps a transnational vein of Anglophone literature about Africa that features missionaries, humanitarians, and their so-called beneficiaries. Putting humanitarian thought in conversation with postcolonial critique, this book brings together African, British, and U.S. writers typically read within separate traditions. Paustian shows how the novel—with its profound sensitivity to narrative—can enrich the critique of white saviorism while also imagining alternatives that give African agency its due.

Winner, 2021 African Literature Association First Book Award

Should a writer work in a former colonial language or in a vernacular? The language question was one of the great, intractable problems that haunted postcolonial literatures in the twentieth century, but it has since acquired a reputation as a dead end for narrow nationalism. This book returns to the language question from a fresh perspective. Instead of asking whether language matters, The Tongue-Tied Imagination explores how the language question itself came to matter.

Focusing on the case of Senegal, Warner investigates the intersection of French and Wolof. Drawing on extensive archival research and an under-studied corpus of novels, poetry, and films in both languages, as well as educational projects and popular periodicals, the book traces the emergence of a politics of language from colonization through independence to the era of neoliberal development. Warner reads the francophone works of well-known authors such as Léopold Senghor, Ousmane Sembène, Mariama Bâ, and Boubacar Boris Diop alongside the more overlooked Wolof-language works with which they are in dialogue.

Refusing to see the turn to vernacular languages only as a form of nativism, The Tongue-Tied Imagination argues that the language question opens up a fundamental struggle over the nature and limits of literature itself. Warner reveals how language debates tend to pull in two directions: first, they weave vernacular traditions into the normative patterns of world literature; but second, they create space to imagine how literary culture might be configured otherwise. Drawing on these insights, Warner brilliantly rethinks the terms of world literature and charts a renewed practice of literary comparison.

Winner, 2021 African Literature Association First Book Award

Should a writer work in a former colonial language or in a vernacular? The language question was one of the great, intractable problems that haunted postcolonial literatures in the twentieth century, but it has since acquired a reputation as a dead end for narrow nationalism. This book returns to the language question from a fresh perspective. Instead of asking whether language matters, The Tongue-Tied Imagination explores how the language question itself came to matter.

Focusing on the case of Senegal, Warner investigates the intersection of French and Wolof. Drawing on extensive archival research and an under-studied corpus of novels, poetry, and films in both languages, as well as educational projects and popular periodicals, the book traces the emergence of a politics of language from colonization through independence to the era of neoliberal development. Warner reads the francophone works of well-known authors such as Léopold Senghor, Ousmane Sembène, Mariama Bâ, and Boubacar Boris Diop alongside the more overlooked Wolof-language works with which they are in dialogue.

Refusing to see the turn to vernacular languages only as a form of nativism, The Tongue-Tied Imagination argues that the language question opens up a fundamental struggle over the nature and limits of literature itself. Warner reveals how language debates tend to pull in two directions: first, they weave vernacular traditions into the normative patterns of world literature; but second, they create space to imagine how literary culture might be configured otherwise. Drawing on these insights, Warner brilliantly rethinks the terms of world literature and charts a renewed practice of literary comparison.

Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics situates Toni Morrison as a writer who writes about writing as much as about racialized, engendered, and sexualized African American, and therefore American, experience. In foregrounding the ethics of fiction writing, the book resists any triumphalist reading of Morrison’s achievement in order to allow the meditative, unsettled, and unsettling questions that arise throughout her long labor at the nexus of language and politics, where her fiction interrogates representation itself.

Moving between close reading and critical theory, Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics reveals the ways in which Morrison’s primary engagement with language has been a search for how and what language is made to communicate, and for how and what speaks in and from generation to generation. There is no easy escape from such legacy, no escape into a pure language free of the burdens of racialized agendas. Rather, there is the example of Morrison’s commitment to writerly, which is to say readerly, wakefulness.

At a time when sustained study devoted to single authors has become rare, this book will be an invaluable resource for readers, scholars, and teachers of Morrison’s work.

Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics situates Toni Morrison as a writer who writes about writing as much as about racialized, engendered, and sexualized African American, and therefore American, experience. In foregrounding the ethics of fiction writing, the book resists any triumphalist reading of Morrison’s achievement in order to allow the meditative, unsettled, and unsettling questions that arise throughout her long labor at the nexus of language and politics, where her fiction interrogates representation itself.

Moving between close reading and critical theory, Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics reveals the ways in which Morrison’s primary engagement with language has been a search for how and what language is made to communicate, and for how and what speaks in and from generation to generation. There is no easy escape from such legacy, no escape into a pure language free of the burdens of racialized agendas. Rather, there is the example of Morrison’s commitment to writerly, which is to say readerly, wakefulness.

At a time when sustained study devoted to single authors has become rare, this book will be an invaluable resource for readers, scholars, and teachers of Morrison’s work.

This study offers a literary history of the war novel in Africa. Coundouriotis argues that this genre, aimed more specifically at African readers than the continent’s better-known bildungsroman tradition, nevertheless makes an important intervention in global understandings of human rights.

The African war novel lies at the convergence of two sensibilities it encounters in European traditions: the naturalist aesthetic and the discourse of humanitarianism, whether in the form of sentimentalism or of human rights law. Both these sensibilities are present in culturally hybrid forms in the African war novel, reflecting its syncretism as a narrative practice engaged with the colonial and postcolonial history of the continent.

The war novel, Coundouriotis argues, stakes claims to collective rights that contrast with the individualism of the bildungsroman tradition. The genre is a form of people’s history that participates in a political struggle for the rights of the dispossessed.