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Abolitionist Geographies

Martha Schoolman

Traditional narratives of the period leading up to the Civil War are invariably framed in geographical terms. The sectional descriptors of the North, South, and West, like the wartime categories of ... More

Traditional narratives of the period leading up to the Civil War are invariably framed in geographical terms. The sectional descriptors of the North, South, and West, like the wartime categories of Union, Confederacy, and border states, mean little without reference to a map of the United States. This book contends that antislavery writers consistently refused those standard terms. Through the idiom this book names “abolitionist geography,” these writers instead expressed their dissenting views about the westward extension of slavery, the intensification of the internal slave trade, and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law by appealing to other anachronistic, partial, or entirely fictional north-south and east-west axes. Abolitionism’s West, for instance, rarely reached beyond the Mississippi River, but its East looked to Britain for ideological inspiration, its North habitually traversed the Canadian border, and its South often spanned the geopolitical divide between the United States and the British Caribbean. The book traces this geography of dissent through the work of Martin Delany, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others. This book explores new relationships between New England transcendentalism and the British West Indies; African-American cosmopolitanism, Britain, and Haiti; sentimental fiction, Ohio, and Liberia; John Brown’s Appalachia and circum-Caribbean marronage.Less

The American Isherwood

James J. Berg and Chris Freeman (eds)

Novelist, memoirist, diarist, and gay pioneer Christopher Isherwood left a wealth of writings. Known for his crisp style and his camera-like precision with detail, Isherwood gained fame for his ... More

Novelist, memoirist, diarist, and gay pioneer Christopher Isherwood left a wealth of writings. Known for his crisp style and his camera-like precision with detail, Isherwood gained fame for his Berlin Stories, which served as source material for the hit stage musical and Academy Award-winning film Cabaret. More recently, his experiences and career in the United States have received increased attention. His novel A Single Man was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film; his long relationship with the artist Don Bachardy, with whom he shared an openly gay lifestyle, was the subject of an award-winning documentary, Chris & Don: A Love Story; and his memoir, Christopher and His Kind, was adapted for the BBC. Isherwood’s colorful journeys took him from post-World War I England to Weimar Germany to European exile to Golden Age Hollywood to Los Angeles in the full flower of gay liberation. After the publication of his diaries, which run to more than one million words and span nearly a half century, it is possible to fully assess his influence. This book considers Isherwood’s diaries, his vast personal archive, and his published works and offers a multifaceted appreciation of a writer who spent more than half of his life in southern California.Less

Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines

Susan McHugh

Beginning with a historical account of why animal stories pose endemic critical challenges to literary and cultural theory, this book argues that key creative developments in narrative form became ... More

Beginning with a historical account of why animal stories pose endemic critical challenges to literary and cultural theory, this book argues that key creative developments in narrative form became inseparable from shifts in animal politics and science in the past century. The book traces representational patterns specific to modern and contemporary fictions of cross-species companionship through a variety of media—including novels, films, fine art, television shows, and digital games—to show how nothing less than the futures of all species life is at stake in narrative forms. The book’s investigations into fictions of people relying on animals in civic and professional life—most obviously those of service animal users and female professional horse riders—showcase distinctly modern and human–animal forms of intersubjectivity. But increasingly graphic violence directed at these figures indicates their ambivalent significance to changing configurations of species.Less

Antebellum at Sea: Maritime Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century America

Jason Berger

In the antebellum years, the Western world’s symbolic realities were expanded and challenged as merchant, military, and scientific activity moved into Pacific and Arctic waters. This book explores ... More

In the antebellum years, the Western world’s symbolic realities were expanded and challenged as merchant, military, and scientific activity moved into Pacific and Arctic waters. This book explores the roles that early nineteenth-century maritime narratives played in conceptualizing economic and social transitions in the developing global market system and what these chronicles disclose about an era marked by immense change. Focusing on the work of James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville, the book enhances our understanding of how the nineteenth century negotiated its own tenuous progress by portraying how a wide range of maritime stories lays bare disturbing experiences of the new. The book draws on Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian notion of fantasy in order to reconsider the complex way maritime accounts operated in the political landscape of antebellum America, examining topics such as the function of maritime labor know-how within a transformation of scientific knowledge, anxiety produced by conflict between gender-specific and culture-specific forms of enjoyment, and how legal practices illuminate troubling juridical paradoxes at the heart of Polk-era political life.Less

At the Borders of Sleep: On Liminal Literature

Peter Schwenger

At the Borders of Sleep investigates a liminal or threshold state between two fundamental modes of human consciousness, the waking state and the sleeping one–which are not as distinct from one ... More

At the Borders of Sleep investigates a liminal or threshold state between two fundamental modes of human consciousness, the waking state and the sleeping one–which are not as distinct from one another as is commonly thought. Perhaps only at the borders of sleep can we get a sense of their connection. During true sleep we are unconscious; and while dreaming we uncritically accept what is happening to us, which we will later translate into untrustworthy waking narratives. As we are poised on the threshold of sleep, however, we can consciously observe what our preoccupied consciousness doesn’t usually admit during the day. Liminal states are so subtle and evanescent that only literary depictions can do them justice; and so literature, along with philosophy and some science, has generated this book’s argument. That argument is then turned back upon literature to show how both reading and writing are liminal experiences, taking place at the edges of conscious thought. The book has sections dealing with drowsiness, insomnia, and the moment of waking; it ends with a section titled “Sleepwaking,” which is devoted to literature–particularly “experimental” literature - that blurs dream and waking life. The authors considered in this study are a varied lot: among others, Marcel Proust, Stephen King, Paul Valéry, Fernando Pessoa, Franz Kafka, Giorgio de Chirico, Virginia Woolf, Philippe Sollers, and Robert Irwin.Less

Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America's Export Age

Ericka Beckman

Between 1870 and 1930, Latin American countries were incorporated into global capitalist networks like never before, mainly as exporters of raw materials and importers of manufactured goods. During ... More

Between 1870 and 1930, Latin American countries were incorporated into global capitalist networks like never before, mainly as exporters of raw materials and importers of manufactured goods. During this Export Age, entire regions were given over to the cultivation of export commodities such as coffee and bananas, capital and labor were relocated to new production centers, and barriers to foreign investment were removed. This book investigates the key role played by literature in imagining and interpreting the rapid transformations unleashed by Latin America’s first major wave of capitalist modernization. Using an innovative blend of literary and economic analysis and drawing from a rich interdisciplinary archive, this book provides the first extended evaluation of Export Age literary production. It traces the emergence of a distinct set of fictions, fantasies, and illusions that accompanied the rise of export-led, dependent capitalism. These “capital fictions” range from promotional pamphlets for Guatemalan coffee and advertisements for French fashions to novels about stock market collapse in Argentina and rubber extraction in the Amazon. The book explores how Export Age literature anticipated some of the key contradictions faced by contemporary capitalist societies, including extreme financial volatility, vast social inequality, and ever-more-intense means of exploitation. Questioning the opposition between culture and economics in Latin America and elsewhere, the book shows that literature operated as a powerful form of political economy during this period.Less

Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker

Gary Giddins

Within days of Charlie “Bird” Parker’s death at the age of thirty-four, a scrawled legend began appearing on walls around New York City: Bird Lives. Gone was one of the most outstanding jazz ... More

Within days of Charlie “Bird” Parker’s death at the age of thirty-four, a scrawled legend began appearing on walls around New York City: Bird Lives. Gone was one of the most outstanding jazz musicians of any era, the troubled genius who brought modernism to jazz and became a defining cultural force for musicians, writers, and artists of every stripe. Arguably the most significant musician in the country at the time of his death, Parker set the standard many musicians strove to reach—though he never enjoyed the same popular success that greeted many of his imitators. Today, the power of Parker’s inventions resonates undiminished; and his influence continues to expand. This book presents account of the life and legend of Charlie Parker. This book overturns many of the myths that have grown up around Parker. It cuts a fascinating portrait of the period, from Parker’s apprentice days in the 1930s in his hometown of Kansas City to the often difficult years playing clubs in New York and Los Angeles, and reveals how Parker came to embody not only musical innovation and brilliance but the rage and exhilaration of an entire generation.Less

Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership

Erica R. Edwards

Social and political change is impossible in the absence of gifted male charismatic leadership—this is the fiction that shaped African American culture throughout the twentieth century. If we ... More

Social and political change is impossible in the absence of gifted male charismatic leadership—this is the fiction that shaped African American culture throughout the twentieth century. If we understand this, this book tells us, we will better appreciate the dramatic variations within both the modern black freedom struggle and the black literary tradition. By considering leaders such as Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Barack Obama as both historical personages and narrative inventions of contemporary American culture, this book brings to the study of black politics the tools of intertextual narrative analysis as well as deconstruction and close reading. Examining a number of literary restagings of black leadership in African American fiction by W. E. B. Du Bois, George Schuyler, Zora Neale Hurston, William Melvin Kelley, Paul Beatty, and Toni Morrison, the book demonstrates how African American literature has contested charisma as a structuring fiction of modern black politics.Less

The Child to Come: Life After the Human Catastrophe

Rebekah Sheldon

The Child to Come reads American culture from the 1960s to the present as a period in which the anxious apprehension of nonhuman vitality has sought alleviation in the figure of the child. Yet the ... More

The Child to Come reads American culture from the 1960s to the present as a period in which the anxious apprehension of nonhuman vitality has sought alleviation in the figure of the child. Yet the salvific life of the child only assuages to the degree that it also gives expression to the forces of nonhuman vitality it was fitted to capture. Drawing on arguments in the field of childhood studies about the interweaving of the child with the life sciences, the book argues that neither life nor the child are what they used to be. Under pressure from ecological change, artificial reproductive technology, genetic engineering, and the neoliberalization of the economy, the child no longer serves a biopolitical technology trained on sexual subjectivity. Instead, the contemporary, queerly-human child signals the ascendancy of a new episteme: the biopolitics of reproduction. Thus, subjectivity is far less crucial than the direct intervention into life itself within the paradigmatic locus of the pregnant woman and the sacred child.Less

Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era

N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman (eds)

This book argues that the humanities may be re-invigorated by adopting a comparative media framework as a basis for curricula re-design, faculty scholarship, and student-oriented learning. With ... More

This book argues that the humanities may be re-invigorated by adopting a comparative media framework as a basis for curricula re-design, faculty scholarship, and student-oriented learning. With twelve essays ranging from classical Greek and Roman bookroll scrolls to locative street art, Renaissance documents to contemporary computer games, Comparative Textual Media offers a proof of concept for the surprising conjunctions and material specificities that a comparative textual media framework can energize and enable. With extraordinary historical range, these essays by outstanding scholars in a variety of fields demonstrate the promise of this paradigm to construct powerful comparisons and intervene constructively in contemporary discussions about the current state of the humanities.Less

Computing as Writing

Daniel Punday

Writing has long been used as a metaphor to understand computing. From the virtual desktop of modern operating systems to the way we name portable devices (the notebook computer, the iPad), writing ... More

Writing has long been used as a metaphor to understand computing. From the virtual desktop of modern operating systems to the way we name portable devices (the notebook computer, the iPad), writing provides a seemingly inevitable model for computing. This book explores the implications and contradictions of this metaphor. Writing not only provides a way to think about the operation of the computer, it also embodies the way that we think about the work that we do on the computer (programmers “writing code”) and how the often muddy line between our home and work life today. In the last decade, scholarship on digital media has sought rigor by limiting its work to particular hardware and software platforms. This book argues, instead, that we should embrace the power and muddiness of the writing metaphor for computing. Because computing isn’t simply a discipline or set of technologies, but also an idea that plays a role in contemporary culture, the cross-disciplinary migration of the writing metaphor is so important. This book seeks out the unlikely places where computing and writing, creativity and corporations converge—from debates about the scope of patent law in the U.S. to design trends within computer user interfaces to the representations of archaic writing technologies in the video games. These kinds of cross-disciplinary comparisons are only possible if we are willing to tolerate a broad understanding of the digital and the ways that it can invoke writing.Less

Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction

Kate Marshall

Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction asks what happens to the kinds of persons inhabiting the richly material landscapes of American realist and naturalist fiction of the late nineteenth ... More

Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction asks what happens to the kinds of persons inhabiting the richly material landscapes of American realist and naturalist fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when they find themselves in more modernist interiors? Addressed to modernist and American literary scholars, media theorists, and architectural historians, Corridor is a study of novels and corridors, and what the relationship between the two reveals about the modern media. It situates in the discourses of reflexive modernity the particular dynamics of exchange between physical circulation systems and media forms that constitute the landscape out of which modernist American fiction emerges, and through which it observes its own operations. It shows how a range of novels enact and encode their medial processes in the concrete structures of American modernity–its infrastructural systems, contagious institutional spaces, its corridors–to demonstrate that the consequences for this recursive movement between novels, spatial structures, and media extend to modern individuals and the interiors that house them. Corridor challenges subject-centered accounts of modernist interiority and its narrative modes, and the tradition of modernist literary criticism that examines the architectural materialities of the novel from this perspective. By attending to the relays between physical and informational communication, and the cross-identifications of interiors and interiority as they are expressed as medial forms in these texts, Corridor develops a counter-narrative of what it means to figure modern persons and their communicative environment in the wayward novels of American modernism.Less

Creole Medievalism: Colonial France and Joseph Bédier's Middle Ages

Michelle R. Warren

Joseph Bédier (1864–1938) was one of the most famous scholars of his day. He held prestigious posts and lectured throughout Europe and the United States, an activity unusual for an academic of his ... More

Joseph Bédier (1864–1938) was one of the most famous scholars of his day. He held prestigious posts and lectured throughout Europe and the United States, an activity unusual for an academic of his time. A scholar of the French Middle Ages, he translated Tristan and Isolde as well as France’s national epic, The Song of Roland. Bédier was publicly committed to French hegemony, yet he hailed from a culture that belied this ideal—the island of Réunion in the southern Indian Ocean. This book demonstrates that Bédier’s relationship to this multicultural and economically peripheral colony motivates his nationalism in complex ways. Simultaneously proud of his French heritage and nostalgic for the island, Bédier defends French sovereignty based on an ambivalent resistance to his creole culture. The book shows that in the early twentieth century, influential intellectuals from Réunion helped define the new genre of the “colonial novel,” adopting a pro-colonial spirit that shaped both medieval and Francophone studies.Less

Dead Letters Sent: Queer Literary Transmission

Kevin Ohi

Literary texts that address tradition and the transmission of knowledge often seem concerned less with preservation than with loss, recurrently describing scenarios of what author Kevin Ohi terms ... More

Literary texts that address tradition and the transmission of knowledge often seem concerned less with preservation than with loss, recurrently describing scenarios of what author Kevin Ohi terms “thwarted transmission.” Such scenes, however, do not so much concede the impossibility of survival as look into what constitutes literary knowledge and whether it can properly be said to be an object to be transmitted, preserved, or lost. Beginning with general questions of transmission—the conveying of knowledge in pedagogy, the transmission and material preservation of texts and forms of knowledge, and even the impalpable communication between text and reader—Dead Letters Sent examines two senses of “queer transmission.” First, it studies the transmission of a minority sexual culture, of queer ways of life and the specialized knowledges they foster. Second, it examines the queer potential of literary and cultural transmission, the queerness that is sheltered within tradition. By exploring how these two senses are intertwined, it builds a persuasive argument for the relevance of queer criticism to literary study. Its detailed attention to works by Plato, Shakespeare, Swinburne, Pater, Wilde, James, and Faulkner seeks to formulate a practice of reading adequate to the queerness Ohi’s book uncovers within the literary tradition. Ohi identifies a radical new future for both queer theory and close reading: the possibility that each might exceed itself in merging with the other, creating a queer theory of literary tradition immanent in an immersed practice of reading.Less

Diaboliques: Six Tales of Decadence

Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

This new translation of Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Les Diaboliques, first published in 1874, aims to re-introduce Barbey to Anglophone readers. The six stories are highly dramatic, psychologically intense ... More

This new translation of Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Les Diaboliques, first published in 1874, aims to re-introduce Barbey to Anglophone readers. The six stories are highly dramatic, psychologically intense and extreme in both subject matter and style, reflecting Barbey’s unique sensibility. The stories combine horror, comedy, and irony in disturbing and memorable ways, but they are also thematically probing, especially in their indictment of what Barbey saw as a soulless and oppressive modernity. Barbey evolved a richly poetic aesthetic to battle the modern bent toward scientism, positivism, and commodification. This translation seeks to find an analogue in English for Barbey’s complex style. Barbey blends elements associated with the oral tale-teller, something like Leskov, with the highly literary, allusive qualities of a more elite writer like Henry James. His sentences blend the qualities of the spoken word with suddenly labyrinthine structures, embeddings, and digressions. The style mirrors the man’s sensibility, and the translation endeavors to do both justice.Less

Each Hour Redeem: Time and Justice in African American Literature

Daylanne K. English

Each Hour Redeem will be the first monograph to focus on how time has been represented materially, politically, and philosophically throughout the African American literary tradition. It therefore ... More

Each Hour Redeem will be the first monograph to focus on how time has been represented materially, politically, and philosophically throughout the African American literary tradition. It therefore offers a unified, though not a uniform, model through which to understand that tradition. This book argues that “strategic anachronism,” the use of prior literary forms to explore contemporary political realities and injustices, characterizes much African American literature, as in Walter Mosley’s recent use of hard-boiled detective fiction; it argues, by contrast, that “strategic presentism” characterizes the Black Arts Movement and the Harlem Renaissance and the two movements’ investment in present-day political potentialities, as in Hughes’s and Baraka’s use of the jazz of their respective eras for their poetic form and content. Overall, Political Fictions argues that across genre and era, African American writers have shown how time and justice work together as interdependent “political fictions,” to adapt a useful phrase from Pauline Hopkins’s 1900 novel, Contending Forces, wherein her African American hero declares, “Constitutional equity is a political fiction."Less

Ecology without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic World

Christine L. Marran

In Ecology without Culture, Christine L. Marran introduces biotropes—material and semiotic figures that exist for human perception—to navigate how and why the material world has proven to be an ... More

In Ecology without Culture, Christine L. Marran introduces biotropes—material and semiotic figures that exist for human perception—to navigate how and why the material world has proven to be an effective medium for representing culture. A bold and timely reconsideration of ecocriticism, this book insists on decentering questions of culture to highlight the materiality of poetry, film, and prose fiction.Less

An Errant Eye: Poetry and Topography in Early Modern France

Tom Conley

This book studies how topography, the art of describing local space and place, developed literary and visual form in early modern France. Arguing for a “new poetics of space” ranging throughout ... More

This book studies how topography, the art of describing local space and place, developed literary and visual form in early modern France. Arguing for a “new poetics of space” ranging throughout French Renaissance poetry, prose, and cartography, this book performs dazzling readings of maps, woodcuts, and poems to plot a topographical shift in the late Renaissance in which space, subjectivity, and politics fall into crisis. It charts the paradox of a period whose demarcation of national space through cartography is rendered unstable by an ambient world of printed writing. This tension, the book demonstrates, cuts through literature and graphic matter of various shapes and forms—hybrid genres that include the comic novel, the emblem-book, the eclogue, sonnets, and the personal essay. The book differs from historical treatments of spatial invention through the book’s argument that the topographic sensibility is one in which the ocular faculty, vital to the description of locale, is endowed with tact and touch.Less

The Essential Ellen Willis

Ellen Willis

Nona Willis Aronowitz (ed.)

This book gathers writings that span forty years and are both deeply engaged with the times in which they were first published and yet remain fresh and relevant amid today’s seemingly intractable ... More

This book gathers writings that span forty years and are both deeply engaged with the times in which they were first published and yet remain fresh and relevant amid today’s seemingly intractable political and cultural battles. Whether addressing the women’s movement, sex and abortion, race and class, or war and terrorism, this book brings to each a distinctive attitude—passionate yet ironic, clear-sighted yet hopeful. Offering a compelling and cohesive narrative of liberationist “transcendence politics,” the chapters here are organized by decade from the 1960s to the 2000s.Less

Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India

Asha Nadkarni

Asha Nadkarni contends that whenever feminists lay claim to citizenship based on women’s biological ability to “reproduce the nation,” they are participating in a eugenic project—sanctioning ... More

Asha Nadkarni contends that whenever feminists lay claim to citizenship based on women’s biological ability to “reproduce the nation,” they are participating in a eugenic project—sanctioning reproduction by some and prohibiting it by others. Employing a wide range of sources from the United States and India, this book shows how the exclusionary impulse of eugenics is embedded within the terms of nationalist feminism. This book reveals connections between U.S. and Indian nationalist feminisms from the late nineteenth century through the 1970s, demonstrating that both call for feminist citizenship centered on the reproductive body as the origin of the nation. It juxtaposes U.S. and Indian feminists (and antifeminists) in provocative and productive ways: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopian novels regard eugenic reproduction as a vital form of national production; Sarojini Naidu’s political speeches and poetry posit liberated Indian women as active agents of a nationalist and feminist modernity predating that of the West; and Katherine Mayo’s Mother India from 1927 warns white U.S. women that Indian reproduction is a “world menace.” In addition, the book traces the refashioning of the icon Mother India, first in Mehboob Khan’s 1957 film Mother India and Kamala Markandaya’s 1954 novel Nectar in a Sieve, and later in Indira Gandhi’s self-fashioning as Mother India during the Emergency from 1975 to 1977.Less