Faculty Bookshelf

This work uncovers a culture of courtly surveillance, secrecy and espionage in an era generally regarded, since Foucault, as characterized by the association of sovereignty with public display. Examining the centrality of espionage in the careers and works of Michel de Montaigne, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Sir Francis Bacon, it demonstrates the association of surveillance with sovereignty before surveillance became the characteristic mode of discipline in the modern, abstract state. The author substantially revises our understanding of the relationship between power and knowledge in the rise of the modern state while subtly illuminating the inscription of that relationship within Renaissance texts.

Shakespeare was not a citizen of London. But the language of his plays is shot through with the concerns of London 'freemen' and their wives, the diverse commercial class that nevertheless excluded adult immigrants from country towns and northern Europe alike. This book combines London historiography, close reading, and recent theories of citizen subjectivity to demonstrate for the first time that Shakespeare's plays embody citizen and alien identities despite their aristocratic settings. Through three chapters, the book points out where the city shadows the country scenes of the major comedies, shows how London's trades animate the 'civil butchery' of the history plays, and explains why England's metropolis becomes the fractured Rome of tragedy.

Although much attention has been paid to early modern European travel to the New World, attention is just beginning to be paid to the travels in the Old World, even though they speak to contemporary concerns with categories like civilization, race, and nation as much as, sometimes more than, the New World explorations.

This book aligns travel narratives and historical surveys of parts of the Old World Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and Russia with texts by Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden that contributed to English ideas about those regions. Addressing the current interest in Europe's relationship with its neighbors and near-neighbors in the Old World, the author introduces the term "paracolonial" to describe Europe's attitude toward those areas where its colonial reach was intermittent or nonexistent.

The book begins by matching ancient and early modern accounts of Egypt and Ethiopia with Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, showing how antiquity's veneration of Egyptian values was tainted in Shakespeare's time by anxieties of racial and sexual degeneration. The next chapter, centered on Milton's Paradise Lost, relates degeneration to the epic cycle of imperial rise and fall attributed to Southwest Asia and its monumental ruins by European historians and travelers. The Elizabethan and Jacobean fascination with Russia is the topic of the third chapter, which argues that Herodotus' Scythia and early modern slavery were the dual origins of the barbarous Russia glimpsed in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost and Milton's Muscovia. In the process, the author offers a novel explanation for the puzzling link between Russia and racial "blackness" in the English Renaissance. The book concludes with India, where degeneration, cyclic empire, and bodily images of racial and sexual difference were combined in geographical writings and sensationally staged in Dryden's Aureng-Zebe.

Tracing the overlap between Graeco-Roman geography and the itineraries of Renaissance travelers and traders, Old Worlds brings together a rich array of texts that rewrite European traditions about a plural antiquity from an early modern English perspective.

Drawing on the later writings of Martin Heidegger, the book traces the correspondence between the philosopher's concept of technology and Shakespeare's poetics of human and natural productivity in the Sonnets.

Tracing the evolution of the library as a modern institution from the late eighteenth century to the digital era, this book explores the diverse practices by which Americans have shared reading matter for instruction, edification, and pleasure. Writing from a rich variety of perspectives, the contributors raise important questions about the material forms and social shapes of American culture. What is a library? How have libraries fostered communities of readers and influenced the practice of reading in particular communities? How did the development of modern libraries alter the boundaries of individual and social experience, and define new kinds of public culture? To what extent have libraries served as commercial enterprises, as centers of power, and as places of empowerment for African Americans, women, and immigrants?Institutions of Reading offers at once a social history of literacy and leisure, an intellectual history of institutional and technological innovations that facilitated the mass distribution and consumption of printed books and periodicals, and a cultural history of the symbolic meanings and practical uses of reading in American life.In addition to the editors, contributors include Elizabeth Amann, Michael Baenen, James Green, Elizabeth McHenry, Barbara Mitchell, Christine Pawley, Janice Radway, James Raven, Karin Roffman, and Roy Rosenzweig..

There are more public libraries in the U.S. than McDonald's restaurants. More children participate in library summer reading programs than in Little League baseball. Libraries—public, school, and academic libraries—are ubiquitous cultural agencies. Yet how much do we know about the multiple ways that they serve and enrich our culture? These essays explore the role of the library in the life of the reader and the library as a place in the life of its users. Contributors are Thomas Augst, Ari Kelman, Elizabeth Jane Aikin, Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, Christine Pawley, Juris Dilevko and Lisa Gottlieb, Jean L. Preer, Jacalyn Eddy, Benjamin Hufbauer, and Emily B. Todd.

Securing the Commonwealth examines how eighteenth-century American writers understood the highly speculative financial times in which they lived. Spanning a century of cultural and literary life, this study shows how the era's literature commonly depicted an American ethos of risk taking and borrowing as the peculiar product of New World daring and the exigencies of revolution and nation building.

Some of the century's most important writers, including Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, Royall Tyler, Charles Brockden Brown, and Judith Sargent Murray, believed that economic and social commonwealth—and one's commitment to that commonwealth—might be grounded in indebtedness and financial insecurity. These writers believed a cash-poor colony or nation could not only advance itself through borrowing but also gain reputability each time it successfully paid off a loan. Equally important, they believed that debt could promote communality: precarious public credit structures could exact popular commitment; intricate financial networks could bind individuals to others and to their government; and indebtedness itself could evoke sympathy for the suffering of others.

Close readings of their literary works reveal how these writers imagined that public life might be shaped by economic experience, and how they understood the public life of literature itself. Insecure times strengthened their conviction that writing could be publicly serviceable, persuading readers to invest in their government, in their fellow Americans, and in the idea of America itself.

Four-year-old TJ spends his days on his lively Harlem block playing with his best friends WT and Blinky and running errands for neighbors. As he comes of age as a “Little Man” with big dreams, TJ faces a world of grown-up adventures and realities. Baldwin’s only children’s book, Little Man, Little Man celebrates and explores the challenges and joys of black childhood.

Now available for the first time in forty years, this new edition of Little Man, Little Man—which retains the charming original illustrations by French artist Yoran Cazac—includes a foreword by Baldwin’s nephew Tejan "TJ" Karefa-Smart and an afterword by his niece Aisha Karefa-Smart, with an introduction by two Baldwin scholars. In it we not only see life in 1970s Harlem from a black child’s perspective, but we also gain a fuller appreciation of the genius of one of America’s greatest writers.

Land/Scape/Theater proposes landscape as a necessary paradigm for understanding modern theater's increasingly spatialized aesthetic as well as its engagement with the cultural meanings of place and space.

Rachel Rosenthal is an internationally recognised pioneer in the field of feminist and ecological performance art. Her revolutionary performance technique integrates text, movement, voice, choreography, improvisation, inventive costuming, dramatic lighting and wildly imaginative sets into an unforgettable theatre experience. In the last twenty years she has presented over thirty-five pieces nationally and internationally. She has been called 'a monument and a marvel' and critically ranked with Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, Ping Chong, Meredith Monk and Laurie Anderson. Her work is passionately dedicated to interrogating, illuminating and improving the relationship between human beings and the planet we share with so many other species. Her performances explore and embody the long history and urgent future of this deeply troubled relationship, and use viscerally compelling performance to draw us into a direct experience of the beauty and power of our lives in nature.

Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama reimagines the content and continuities of theater history and exposes underlying dialogues between "home and homelessness, belonging and exile"—a century-long struggle with the meaning and power of place, which the author terms "geopathology." By reading canonical works in conjunction with contemporary ones, Chaudhuri charts the evolution of a dramatic paradigm with profound theatrical and thematic implications.

Theatre is a uniquely powerful site for the kind of thinking called for by the crises of climate change. Encompassing academic research, theatre work-shopping, playwriting, dramaturgy, and theoretical writing, this book offers a practical, theoretical, and critical engagement with the urgent issue of making art in the age of climate change.

We all have an animal story—the pet we loved, the wild animal that captured our childhood imagination, the deer the neighbor hit while driving. While scientific breakthroughs in animal cognition, the effects of global climate change and dwindling animal habitats, and the exploding interdisciplinary field of animal studies have complicated things, such stories remain a part of how we tell the story of being human. Animal Acts collects eleven exciting, provocative, and moving stories by solo performers, accompanied by commentary that places the works in a broader context.

What does it mean for a child to be a "reader" and how did American culture come to place such a high value on this identity? Reading Children offers a history of the relationship between children and books in Anglo-American modernity, exploring long-lived but now forgotten early children's literature, discredited yet highly influential pedagogical practices, the property lessons inherent in children's book ownership, and the emergence of childhood itself as a literary property.

The nursery and schoolroom version of the social contract, Crain argues, underwrote children's entry not only into reading and writing but also into a world of commodity and property relations. Increasingly positioned as an indispensable form of cultural capital by the end of the eighteenth century, literacy became both the means and the symbol of children's newly recognized self-possession and autonomy. At the same time, as children's legal and economic status was changing, "childhood" emerged as an object of nostalgia for adults. Literature for children enacted the terms of children's self-possession, often with explicit references to property, contracts, or inheritances, and yet also framed adult longing for an imagined past called "childhood."

Dozens of colorful illustrations chart the ways in which early literature for children was transformed into spectacle through new image technologies and a burgeoning marketplace that capitalized on nostalgic fantasies of childhood conflated with bowdlerized fantasies of history. Reading Children offers new terms for thinking about the imbricated and mutually constitutive histories of literacy, property, and childhood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that ground current anxieties and long-held beliefs about childhood and reading.

Richly illustrated with often antic images from alphabet books and primers, The Story of A relates the history of the alphabet as a genre of text for children and of alphabetization as a social practice in America, from early modern reading primers to the literature of the American Renaissance.

Culture in Camouflage aims to remap the history of British war culture by insisting on the centrality and importance of the literature of the Second World War. The book offers the first comprehensive account of the emergence of modern war culture, arguing that its exceptional forms and temporalities force us to reappraise British cultural modernity.The book explores how writers like Ford Madox Ford, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, T.E. Lawrence, Winston Churchill,Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, James Hanley, Rex Warner, Alexander Baron, Keith Douglas, Henry Green, and Graham Greene contested the dominant narratives of war projected by an enormously powerful and persuasive mass media and culture industry. Patrick Deer reads war literature as one element in an expanded cultural field, which also includes popular culture and masscommunications, the productions of war planners and military historians, projections of new technologies of violence, the fantasies and theories of strategists, and the material culture of total war. Modern war cultures, Deer contends, are defined by their drive to normalize conflict and war-making, by their struggle to colonize the entire wartime cultural field, and by their claim to monopolize representations and interpretation of the conflict. But the mobilization of cultural formations during wartime reveals, at times glaringly, the constitutive contradictions at the heart of modern ideas of culture. The Great War failed to produce a popular war culture on the home front, producinginstead an extraordinary literature of protest, yet the strategists struggled to regain their oversight over both the enemy across no man's land, and the minds and bodies of their own mass conscript armies. The interwar years saw a massive effort to make strategic fantasies a reality; if thetechnology of imperial air power or mobile armoured warfare did not yet exist, culture could be mobilized to shore up the ramshackle war machine. During World War Two a fully fledged British war culture emerged triumphant in time of national crisis, offering the vision of a fully mobilized island fortress, a loyal empire, and a modernized war machine ready to wage a futuristic war of space and movement. This was the struggle that British World War Two writers confronted with extraordinarycourage and creativity.

Beginning with an examination of the different stages of women's lives--childhood, virginity, marriage and widowhood, this Companion addresses various aspects of medieval life that affected women's writing. These include the nature of authorship in the period, the position of women at home or in nunneries, and their relationship to religion. Additional essays cover the lives and work of such prominent women writers as Heloise, Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe and Joan of Arc. A chronology and guides to further reading add information which students and scholars will find invaluable.

In Getting Medieval Carolyn Dinshaw examines communities—dissident and orthodox—in late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth-century England to create a new sense of queer history. Reaching beyond both medieval and queer studies, Dinshaw demonstrates in this challenging work how intellectual inquiry into pre-modern societies can contribute invaluably to current issues in cultural studies. In the process, she makes important connections between past and present cultures that until now have not been realized. 

In her pursuit of historical analyses that embrace the heterogeneity and indeterminacy of sex and sexuality, Dinshaw examines canonical Middle English texts such as the Canterbury Tales and The Book of Margery Kempe. She examines polemics around the religious dissidents known as the Lollards as well as accounts of prostitutes in London to address questions of how particular sexual practices and identifications were normalized while others were proscribed. By exploring contemporary (mis)appropriations of medieval tropes in texts ranging from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction to recent Congressional debates on U.S. cultural production, Dinshaw demonstrates how such modern media can serve to reinforce constrictive heteronormative values and deny the multifarious nature of history. Finally, she works with and against the theories of Michel Foucault, Homi K. Bhabha, Roland Barthes, and John Boswell to show how deconstructionist impulses as well as historical perspectives can further an understanding of community in both pre- and postmodern societies.

This long-anticipated volume will be indispensible to medieval and queer scholars and will be welcomed by a larger cultural studies audience.

Through an analysis of the poems Chaucers wordes Unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn, Troilus and Criseyde, the Legend of Good Women, the Man of Law’s Tale, the Wife of Bath’s Tale and its Prologue, the Clerk’s Tale, and the Pardoner’s Tale, Carolyn Dinshaw offers a provocative argument on medieval sexual constructs and Chaucer’s role in shaping them. Operating under the assumption that people read and write certain ways based upon society’s demands, Dinshaw examines gender identity and the effects of a patriarchal society. The focal point of Dinshaw’s argument is the idea that the literary text can be seen as the female body while any literary activities upon the text are decidedly male. Through a series of six provocative essays, Dinshaw argues that Chaucer was not only aware that gender is a social construction, but that he self-consciously worked to oppose the dominance of masculinity that a patriarchal society places on texts by creating works in which gender identity and hierarchy were more fluid.

The unknown and disregarded literary arts of sixteenth century England (graffiti, tattoos, writing on clothes or ceramics...): a startling new perspective of early modern literature and cultural history.

“Cultural Graphology” could be the name of a new human science: this was Derrida’s speculation when, in the late 1960s, he imagined a discipline that combined psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and a commitment to the topic of writing. He never undertook the project himself but did leave two brief sketches of how he thought cultural graphology might proceed. In this book, Juliet Fleming picks up where Derrida left off. Using both his early and later thought, and the psychoanalytic texts to which it is addressed, to examine the print culture of early modern England, she drastically unsettles some key assumptions of book history.

Fleming shows that the single most important lesson to survive from Derrida’s early work is that we do not know what writing is. Channeling Derrida’s thought into places it has not been seen before, she examines printed errors, spaces, and ornaments (topics that have hitherto been marginal to our accounts of print culture) and excavates the long-forgotten reading practice of cutting printed books. Proposing radical deformations to the meanings of fundamental and apparently simple terms such as “error,” “letter,” “surface,” and “cut,” Fleming opens up exciting new pathways into our understanding of writing all told.

This anthology brings together writings ranging from the canonical to the obscure that suggest the scope of responses--from wondrous celebration to apocalyptic horror--elicited by the advent and establishment of the factory system in nineteenth-century Britain. Addressing complex questions about the possible effects of mass production on human life and labor, this collection presents important works by John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, and William Morris alongside lesser-known selections from factory tourists' tales and inspectors' reports, Parliamentary testimony, a Luddite pamphlet, and a cotton mill worker's autobiography. These texts reveal the richness and complexity of the debates, contradictions, and conflicts that accompanied the rise of the factory as the most important site of commodity production. The selections are arranged and introduced in a way that helps students make sense of this complicated field. An introduction by the editor and a chronology of the British factory system help place the materials in their historical context. 

While the Victorian novel famously describes, catalogs, and inundates the reader with things, the protocols for reading it have long enjoined readers not to interpret most of what crowds its pages. The Ideas in Things explores apparently inconsequential objects in popular Victorian texts to make contact with their fugitive meanings. Developing an innovative approach to analyzing nineteenth-century fiction, Elaine Freedgood here reconnects the things readers unwittingly ignore to the stories they tell.

In Victorian Writing about Risk, Elaine Freedgood explores a wide spectrum of once-popular literature, including works on political economy, sanitary reform, balloon flight, and African exploration. The consolations offered by this geography of risk are precariously predicated on the stability of dominant Victorian definitions of people and places. Women, men, the laboring and middle classes, Africa and Africans: all have assigned identities that allow risk to be located and contained. When identities shift and boundaries fail, danger and safety begin to appear in all the wrong places.

Now praised for its realism and formal coherence, the Victorian novel was not always great, or even good, in the eyes of its critics. As Elaine Freedgood reveals in Worlds Enough, it was only in the late 1970s that literary critics constructed a prestigious version of British realism, erasing more than a century of controversy about the value of Victorian fiction.

Examining criticism of Victorian novels since the 1850s, Freedgood demonstrates that while they were praised for their ability to bring certain social truths to fictional life, these novels were also criticized for their formal failures and compared unfavorably to their French and German counterparts. She analyzes the characteristics of realism—denotation, omniscience, paratext, reference, and ontology—and the politics inherent in them, arguing that if critics displaced the nineteenth-century realist novel as the standard by which others are judged, literary history might be richer. It would allow peripheral literatures and the neglected wisdom of their critics to come fully into view. She concludes by questioning the aesthetic racism built into prevailing ideas about the centrality of realism in the novel, and how those ideas have affected debates about world literature.

By re-examining the critical reception of the Victorian novel, Worlds Enough suggests how we can rethink our practices and perceptions about books we think we know.

From Medea to Goneril to Sharon Stone's ice-pick murderer to Susan Smith, the image of the violent woman has fascinated readers and audiences in a way that other figures have not. Jo Hendin looks at the figure of the violent woman in her latest book where she argues that a violent woman is a grenade pitched towards both conservative and liberal views of women. Peopled with some of the most fascinating women in history, both real and imagined, Heartbreakers is a thought-provoking read.

During the seventeenth century, England was beset by three epidemics of the bubonic plague, each outbreak claiming between a quarter and a third of the population of London and other urban centers. Surveying a wide range of responses to these epidemics—sermons, medical tracts, pious exhortations, satirical pamphlets, and political commentary—Plague Writing in Early Modern England brings to life the many and complex ways Londoners made sense of such unspeakable devastation.

The iconoclastic spirit of the English Reformation is examined in the works of Spenser, Donne, Herbert, Quarles and Milton. The central issue engaged here is the negotiation in these writers between the Sidnean tradition of "ut pictura poesis" that 'sees' poetry as a "speaking picture" and the antipictorial Protestant suspicion of the eye as the "devil's doorway"--according to Luther, the portal of idolatry. 

The book traces the literary appropriation of the theory and practice of linear perspective in the visual arts in English writing from Shakespeare to Milton.  The word "perspective" itself comes into the English Renaissance by way of the pictorial tradition and is employed both literally in relation to visual art and metaphorically as a way of seeing-- specifying an individual "perspective" that both empowers and delimits the seeing (or reading) subject who is accorded a unique "point of view."  The analysis focuses specifically on a species of "curious" or "witty" perspective that extends the visual and poetic representation of space as a mathematically precise "window" onto the real, into the anamorphic realm of distortion and duplicity.

Part literary history and part medical sociology, Gilman’s book chronicles the careers of three major immigrant Yiddish poets of the twentieth century—Solomon Bloomgarten (Yehoash), Sholem Shtern, and H. Leivick—all of whom lived through, and wrote movingly of, their experience as patients in a tuberculosis sanatorium. Gilman addresses both the formative influence of the sanatorium on the writers’ work and the culture of an institution in which, before the days of antibiotics, writing was encouraged as a form of therapy. He argues that each writer produced a significant body of work during his recovery, itself an experience that profoundly influenced the course of his subsequent literary career. Seeking to recover the "imaginary" of the sanatorium as a scene of writing by doctors and patients, Gilman explores the historical connection between tuberculosis treatment and the written word. Through a close analysis of Yiddish poems, and translations of these writers, Gilman sheds light on how essential writing and literature were to the sanatorium experience. All three poets wrote under the shadow of death. Their works are distinctive, but their most urgent concerns are shared: strangers in a strange land, suffering, displacement, acculturation, and, inevitably, what it means to be a Jew.

Thomas Howard, the 21st Earl of Arundel (1586-1646) was famed in the day as the "Collector Earl" whose unparalleled galleries were filled with paintings, sculpture and antiquities. His circle included a diverse collection of individuals who enjoyed the Earl's patronage:  Anthony Van Dyke, the classical philologist and art historian Franciscus Junius, the natural philosopher Kenelm Digby, and the physician William Harvey.  This study focuses on the ways in which the Earl's project to plant an English colony on the island of Madagascar enlisted the contributions of all these individuals in various but related ways.  The centerpiece of this analysis (the cover illustration) is Van Dyck's "Madagascar portrait" of the Earl and his Countess contemplating this venture.  Junius appears in the background at the right along with a classical head--likely Homer's--to connect the Earl's current colonial adventure with the ancient tradition of epic seafaring.

In Always Already New, Lisa Gitelman explores the newness of new media while she asks what it means to do media history. Using the examples of early recorded sound and digital networks, Gitelman challenges readers to think about the ways that media work as the simultaneous subjects and instruments of historical inquiry. Presenting original case studies of Edison's first phonographs and the Pentagon's first distributed digital network, the ARPANET, Gitelman points suggestively toward similarities that underlie the cultural definition of records (phonographic and not) at the end of the nineteenth century and the definition of documents (digital and not) at the end of the twentieth. As a result, Always Already New speaks to present concerns about the humanities as much as to the emergent field of new media studies. Records and documents are kernels of humanistic thought, after all--part of and party to the cultural impulse to preserve and interpret. Gitelman's argument suggests inventive contexts for "humanities computing" while also offering a new perspective on such traditional humanities disciplines as literary history.Making extensive use of archival sources, Gitelman describes the ways in which recorded sound and digitally networked text each emerged as local anomalies that were yet deeply embedded within the reigning logic of public life and public memory. In the end Gitelman turns to the World Wide Web and asks how the history of the Web is already being told, how the Web might also resist history, and how using the Web might be producing the conditions of its own historicity.

Paper Knowledge is a remarkable book about the mundane: the library card, the promissory note, the movie ticket, the PDF (Portable Document Format). It is a media history of the document. Drawing examples from the 1870s, the 1930s, the 1960s, and today, Lisa Gitelman thinks across the media that the document form has come to inhabit over the last 150 years, including letterpress printing, typing and carbon paper, mimeograph, microfilm, offset printing, photocopying, and scanning. Whether examining late nineteenth century commercial, or "job" printing, or the Xerox machine and the role of reproduction in our understanding of the document, Gitelman reveals a keen eye for vernacular uses of technology. She tells nuanced, anecdote-filled stories of the waning of old technologies and the emergence of new. Along the way, she discusses documentary matters such as the relation between twentieth-century technological innovation and the management of paper, and the interdependence of computer programming and documentation. Paper Knowledge is destined to set a new agenda for media studies.

We live in the era of Big Data, with storage and transmission capacity measured not just in terabytes but in petabytes (where peta- denotes a quadrillion, or a thousand trillion). Data collection is constant and even insidious, with every click and every “like” stored somewhere for something. This book reminds us that data is anything but “raw,” that we shouldn’t think of data as a natural resource but as a cultural one that needs to be generated, protected, and interpreted. The book’s essays describe eight episodes in the history of data from the predigital to the digital. Together they address such issues as the ways that different kinds of data and different domains of inquiry are mutually defining; how data are variously “cooked” in the processes of their collection and use; and conflicts over what can—or can’t—be “reduced” to data. Contributors discuss the intellectual history of data as a concept; describe early financial modeling and some unusual sources for astronomical data; discover the prehistory of the database in newspaper clippings and index cards; and consider contemporary “dataveillance” of our online habits as well as the complexity of scientific data curation.

John Guillory challenges the most fundamental premises of the canon debate by resituating the problem of canon formation in an entirely new theoretical framework. The result is a book that promises to recast not only the debate about the literary curriculum but also the controversy over "multiculturalism" and the current "crisis of the humanities." Employing concepts drawn from Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, Guillory argues that canon formation must be understood less as a question of the representation of social groups than as a question of the distribution of "cultural capital" in the schools, which regulate access to literacy, to the practices of reading and writing.

“For several years,” write the editors of What’s Left of Theory, “a debate on the politics of theory has been conducted energetically within literary studies. The terms of the debate, however, are far from clear. What is meant by politics? What is meant by theory?”

What’s Left of Theory is a vigorous engagement with that thorniest of critical questions: how today are theory and progressive thought connected? Michael Warner, activist and critic, examines ‘zones of privacy and zones of theory’ while law professor Janet Halley considers theory and its applicability to sex harassment. Jeff Nunokawa examines Oscar Wilde, Marjorie Levinson reads Elizabeth Bishop alongside National Geographic; John Brenkman considers ‘extreme criticism’, Michael Berube the ‘future of contingency’; William Connolly addresses the matter of secularism, Gayatri Spivak explores what she calls ‘theory-remains’, and Jonathan Culler demonstrates once again his gift for explaining the complex in an essay that identifies ‘the literary in theory’.

Editors Butler, Guillory, and Thomas have brought together not only outstanding questioners, but outstanding questions. As their introduction puts it, “Are there ways of pursuing a politically reflective literary analysis that have definitively left theory behind, and must ‘theory’ be left behind for left literary analysis to emerge? Has the study of literature passed beyond its encounter with theory? If so, in passing beyond theory, has it remained unchanged? Does the recent cry for a ‘return to literature’ signal the surpassing of theory, the fact that literature remains after theory? Does literature remain (the same) after theory?” For students of literature and the humanities in general, these questions are not only left: they endure.

How is literary authority acquired? How does a poet persuade himself of his own authority? By what process is a writer elevated above his peers and ultimately to immortality?

In Poetic Authority John Guillory attempts to answer these questions by considering the works of Spenser and Milton, two great poets of the English tradition whose struggles with the represented sources of poetic authority led them to define their own original poetic voices.

Both Spenser and Milton, Guillory argues, resist the secular triumphs of Renaissance literature, and attempt in their major works to produce a sacred poetry which would neither contend with, nor be too much diminished by, the authority of the Bible. The ambition and ultimate failure of the sacred poet has important consequences for literary history, particularly for the later history of “imagination.”

With an eye to the larger questions of the canon and the long English tradition, Poetic Authority seeks to explain that strange hiatus in literary history when Spenser and Milton asserted an already archaic claim to vatic authority, against the very language of imagination that would soon come to be associated with their names.

In his timely and incisive book Are We Not Men?, Phillip Brian Harper explores issues of race and representation and shows that ideas about black masculinity have always played a troubled role both in the formation of African-American identity and in the mass media at large. An original, far-reaching and ultimately humane work of cultural criticism, Harper's book argues convincingly that there are no innocent texts, and forces us to reexamine the culture that surrounds us. Are We Not Men? will find a wide audience among those interested in American and African American cultural studies, gender studies and gay/lesbian studies.

In Private Affairs, Phillip Brian Harper explores the social and cultural significance of the private, proposing that, far from a universal right, privacy is limited by one's racial-and sexual-minority status. Ranging across cinema, literature, sculpture, and lived encounters-from Rodin's The Kiss to Jenny Livingston's Paris is Burning-Private Affairs demonstrates how the very concept of privacy creates personal and sociopolitical hierarchies in contemporary America.

In a major reassessment of African American culture, Phillip Brian Harper intervenes in the ongoing debate about the “proper” depiction of black people. He advocates for African American aesthetic abstractionism—a representational mode whereby an artwork, rather than striving for realist verisimilitude, vigorously asserts its essentially artificial character.  Maintaining that realist representation reaffirms the very social facts that it might have been understood to challenge, Harper contends that abstractionism shows up the actual constructedness of those facts, thereby subjecting them to critical scrutiny and making them amenable to transformation.

How does a book become an international bestseller? What happens to it as it is translated into different languages, contexts, and societies? How is it changed by the intellectual environments it encounters? What does the transnational circulation mean for its reception back home? Exploring the international life of a particularly long-lived and widely traveled book, Isabel Hofmeyr follows The Pilgrim's Progress as it circulates through multiple contexts--and into some 200 languages--focusing on Africa, where 80 of the translations occurred.

This feat of literary history is based on intensive research that criss-crossed among London, Georgia, Kingston, Bedford (John Bunyan's hometown), and much of sub-Saharan Africa. Finely written and unusually wide-ranging, it accounts for how The Pilgrim's Progress traveled abroad with the Protestant mission movement, was adapted and reworked by the societies into which it traveled, and, finally, how its circulation throughout the empire affected Bunyan's standing back in England.

The result is a new intellectual approach to Bunyan--one that weaves together British, African, and Caribbean history with literary and translation studies and debates over African Christianity and mission. Even more important, this book is a rare example of a truly worldly study of "world literature"--and of the critical importance of translation, both linguistic and cultural.

A New Theory of Old English Meter sets out a simple new theory of Old English meter that is based on a bare minimum of initial assumptions and metrical principles, and supported by rigorous arguments and by evidence from a computer-assisted analysis of Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon. The new theory is revolutionary in concluding that alliteration rather than stress is the most important feature of the meter, and in rejecting the traditional assumptions of two lifts and four metrical positions per verse. It provides improved solutions for many of the perennial problems of Old English meter, makes possible an elegant logical explanation for the kinds of verses that occur and those which do not occur, and prepares the way for the most radical conclusion of the book: that Old English meter is not based on rhythm.

The work of Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist and anti-colonialist activist who died prematurely in 1961 at the age of 36, has marked generations of anti-colonialists, civil rights activists and specialists in postcolonial studies. Since the publication of his books (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952; The Year V of the Algerian Revolution, 1959; The Damned of the Earth, 1961), it was known that many of his writings remained unpublished or inaccessible. In particular his psychiatric writings, including those devoted to "colonialist alienation seen through mental illness" (in the words of its editor François Maspero). This material constitutes the heart of this volume, drawn up and presented following a patient work of collecting and a long research by Jean Khalfa and Robert JC Young. The reader will find there the scientific articles of Fanon, his thesis in psychiatry, as well as certain unpublished texts and texts published in the interior journal of the hospital of Blida-Joinville where he practiced from 1953 to 1956. There will also be two pieces. written during his medical studies (L'Oeil se nie and Les Mains parallèles), the correspondence that could be found as well as certain texts published in El Moudjahid after 1958, not included in Pour la Révolution africaine (1964). This remarkable collection is completed by the correspondence between François Maspero and the writer Giovanni Pirelli for a project to publish Fanon's complete works, as well as by the reasoned analysis of the latter's library.

Language and Style in The Inheritors links the linguistic characteristics of the language of William Golding's underappreciated second novel with larger stylistic and thematic issues to achieve a satisfying and persuasive interpretation while also demonstrating the usefulness and effectiveness(and some of the limitations) of linguistic and computer-assisted approaches, without being overwhelmingly theoretical or technical. This analysis uses comparative data from a corpus of more than thirty British and American novels to compare and contrast with the contents of The Inheritors. It begins with a discussion of point of view, style, and interpretation and moves into an examination of The Inheritors in regard to other works that focus on it. The author then provides a discussion of Golding's manipulation of transitivity to produce the animistic character of the novel, and a statistical analysis of its readability, sentence complexity, and vocabulary complexity, followed by an analysis of diction. He concludes with an integration of the linguistic discoveries with important thematic issues, and a consideration of altered versions of The Inheritors.

Modes of Composition and the Durability of Style employs the tools and methods of computational stylistics to show that style is extremely resistant to changes in how texts are produced. Addressing an array of canonical writers, including William Faulkner, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James, along with popular contemporary writers like Stephen King and Ian McEwan, this volume presents a systematic study of changes in mode of composition and writing technologies. Computational analysis of texts produced in multiple circumstances of composition, such as dictation, handwriting, typewriting, word processing, and translation, reveals the extraordinary durability of authorial style. Modes of Composition and the Durability of Style in Literature will be essential for readers interested in exploring the rapidly expanding field of digital approaches to literature.

Stylistics: Prospect & Retrospect looks backward toward classic and foundational approaches and texts that helped to establish the field of stylistics. It also looks forward by examining recent innovations that seem likely to alter the ways in which style is studied in the years to come. The essays presented here, written by an array of experts from nine countries on four continents, employ a wide range of approaches to works that range from romantic poetry to contemporary fiction and from traditional folktales and nursery rhymes to contemporary film. The variety of authors, approaches, and works found here testifies to the vitality of the field of stylistics, and these essays should appeal to all those interested in the nature of style and in the history and future of stylistics.

It is time to change the way we talk about writing in theater. This book offers a new argument that reimagines modern theater's critical power and places innovative writing at the heart of the experimental stage. While performance studies, German Theaterwissenschaft, and even text-based drama studies have commonly envisioned theatrical performance as something that must operate beyond the limits of the textual imagination, this book shows how a series of writers have actively shaped new conceptions of theater's radical potential. Engaging with a range of theorists, including Theodor Adorno, Jarcho reveals a modern tradition of 'negative theatrics,' whose artists undermine the here and now of performance in order to challenge the value and the power of the existing world. This vision emerges through surprising new readings of modernist classics - by Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Samuel Beckett - as well as contemporary American works by Suzan-Lori Parks, Elevator Repair Service, and Mac Wellman.

In the three plays collected here­­—Grimly Handsome (OBIE Award for Best New American Play), Dreamless Land, and Every Angel is Brutal­—Julia Jarcho, hailed as a “vital talent” (The New Yorker) and “one of our more compelling playwrights” (Time Out New York), mashes up noir, terror, and action genres. The weird, taut surfaces of her stories hypnotize, while the plays burrow into unanswerable questions that never come fully into focus but rather lay within the whole like a kind of groundwater: What is the impulse to violence? Could we hold a memory that precedes our experience?

The political value of African American literature has long been a topic of great debate among American writers, both black and white, from Thomas Jefferson to Barack Obama. In Representing the Race, Gene Andrew Jarrett traces the genealogy of this topic in order to develop an innovative political history of African American literature. Jarrett examines texts of every sort—pamphlets, autobiographies, cultural criticism, poems, short stories, and novels—to parse the myths of authenticity, popular culture, nationalism, and militancy that have come to define African American political activism in recent decades. He argues that unless we show the diverse and complex ways that African American literature has transformed society, political myths will continue to limit our understanding of this intellectual tradition.

For a work to be considered African American literature, does it need to focus on black characters or political themes? Must it represent these within a specific stylistic range? Or is it enough for the author to be identified as African American? In Deans and Truants, Gene Andrew Jarrett traces the shifting definitions of African American literature and the authors who wrote beyond those boundaries at the cost of critical dismissal and, at times, obscurity. From the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, de facto deans—critics and authors as different as William Howells, Alain Locke, Richard Wright, and Amiri Baraka—prescribed the shifting parameters of realism and racial subject matter appropriate to authentic African American literature, while truant authors such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, George S. Schuyler, Frank Yerby, and Toni Morrison—perhaps the most celebrated African American author of the twentieth century—wrote literature anomalous to those standards.

This book recovers the curious history of the "insensible" in the Age of Sensibility. Tracking this figure through the English novel's uneven and messy past, Wendy Anne Lee draws on Enlightenment theories of the passions to place philosophy back into conversation with narrative. Contemporary critical theory often simplifies or disregards earlier accounts of emotions, while eighteenth-century studies has focused on cultural histories of sympathy. In launching a more philosophical inquiry about what emotions are, Failures of Feeling corrects for both of these oversights. Proposing a fresh take on emotions in the history of the novel, its chapters open up literary history's most provocative cases of unfeeling, from the iconic scrivener who would prefer not to and the reviled stock figure of the prude, to the heroic rape survivor, the burnt-out man-of-feeling, and the hard-hearted Jane Austen herself. These pivotal cases of insensibility illustrate a new theory of mind and of the novel predicated on an essential paradox: the very phenomenon that would appear to halt feeling and plot actually compels them. Contrary to the assumption that fictional investment relies on a richness of interior life, Lee shows instead that nothing incites the passions like dispassion.

Original both in its sources and in the claims it makes for the nature, extent, and complexities of women's participation in print culture and public politics, this book provides a wealth of new information about middle- and lower-class women's political and literary lives, and shows that these women were not merely the passive distributors of other people's political ideas. Quite to the contrary, women of the widest possible variety of socioeconomic backgrounds and religio-political allegiances played so prominent a role in the production and transmission of political ideas through print as to belie simultaneous powerful claims that women had no place in public life.

Just as today’s embrace of the digital has sparked interest in the history of print culture, so in eighteenth-century Britain the dramatic proliferation of print gave rise to urgent efforts to historicize different media forms and to understand their unique powers. And so it was, Paula McDowell argues, that our modern concepts of oral culture and print culture began to crystallize, and authors and intellectuals drew on older theological notion of oral tradition to forge the modern secular notion of oral tradition that we know today.

Over the past decade the popularity of black writers including E. Lynn Harris and Terry McMillan has been hailed as an indication that an active African American reading public has come into being. Yet this is not a new trend; there is a vibrant history of African American literacy, literary associations, and book clubs. Forgotten Readers reveals that neglected past, looking at the reading practices of free blacks in the antebellum north and among African Americans following the Civil War. It places the black upper and middle classes within American literary history, illustrating how they used reading and literary conversation as a means to assert their civic identities and intervene in the political and literary cultures of the United States from which they were otherwise excluded.

In To Make Negro Literature Elizabeth McHenry traces African American authorship in the decade following the 1896 legalization of segregation. She shifts critical focus from the published texts of acclaimed writers to unfamiliar practitioners, whose works reflect the unsettledness of African American letters in this period. Analyzing literary projects that were unpublished, unsuccessful, or only partially achieved, McHenry recovers a hidden genealogy of Black literature as having emerged tentatively, laboriously, and unevenly. She locates this history in books sold by subscription, in lists and bibliographies of African American authors and books assembled at the turn of the century, in the act of ghostwriting, and in manuscripts submitted to publishers for consideration and the letters of introduction that accompanied them. By attending to these sites and prioritizing overlooked archives, McHenry reveals a radically different literary landscape, revising concepts of Black authorship and offering a fresh account of the development of “Negro literature” focused on the never published, the barely read, and the unconventional.

A vital, exhilarating new collection of poems from the National Book Critics Circle nominee. From lichens to malls to merchant republics, it's "another day in this here cosmos," in Maureen N. McLane's stunning third poetry collection, "This Blue. "Here are songs for and of a new century, poems both archaic and wholly now. In the middle of life, stationed in our common "Terran Life," the poet conjures urban pigeons, Adirondack mountains, Genoa, Andalucia, Belfast, Parma; here is a world sounded out, broken, possibly shareable, newly named: "Take it up Old Adam-- / everyday the world exists / to be named." "This Blue" is a searching and a singing--intricate, sexy, smart."

From the alphabet inscribed in our DNA to the stars that once told stories, Same Life maps a cosmos both intricate and vast. In her first full-length book of poems, Maureen N. McLane has written a beautifully sensual and moving work, full of passion and sadness and humor and understanding. Erotically charged lyrics conjure a latter-day Sappho; major sequences explore citizenship and sexuality, landscape and history, moving us from Etruscan ruins to video porn, ushering us through cities, gardens, lakefronts, and airplanes. Here are poems equally alert to shifts in weather and cracks in consciousness; here is a poet equally at home with delicate song and vivid polemic. Same Life evokes an American life in transit, shareable yet singular; singable, ponderable, erotic; an unpredictable venture in twenty-first-century soul-making.

"Oh! there are spirits of the air," wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley. In this stunningly original book, Maureen N. McLane channels the spirits and voices that make up the music in one poet's mind. Weaving criticism and memoir, My Poets explores a life reading and a life read. McLane invokes not necessarily the best poets, nor the most important poets (whoever these might be), but those writers who, in possessing her, made her. "I am marking here what most marked me," she writes. Ranging from Chaucer to H.D. to William Carlos Williams to Louise Glück to Shelley (among others), McLane tracks the "growth of a poet's mind," as Wordsworth put it in The Prelude. In poetical prose both probing and incantatory, McLane has written a radical book of experimental criticism. Susan Sontag called for an "erotics of interpretation": this is it. Part Bildung, part dithyramb, part exegesis, My Poets extends an implicit invitation to you, dear reader, to consider who your "my poets," or "my novelists," or "my filmmakers," or "my pop stars," might be.

In World Enough, Maureen N. McLane maps a universe of feeling and thought via skyscapes, city strolls, lunar vistas, and passages through environments given and built. These poems explore how we come to know ourselves―sensually, intellectually, politically, biologically, historically, and anthropologically. Moving from the most delicate address to the broadest salutation, World Enough takes us from New England to New York to France to the moon. McLane fuses song and critique, giving us poetry as "musical thought," in Carlyle's phrase. Shuttling between idyll and disaster, between old forms and open experiments, these are restless, probing, exacting poems that aim to take the measure of―and to give a measure for―where we are. McLane moves through many forms and creates her own, invoking the French Revolution alongside convolutions of the heart and revolutions of the moon. Shifting effortlessly between the species and the self, between the sentient surround and the peculiar pulse within, World Enough attests to experience both singular and shared: "not that I was alive / but that we were."

This book is a history and theory of British poetry between 1760 and 1830, focussing on the relationship between Romantic poetry and the production, circulation and textuality of ballads. By discussing the ways in which eighteenth-century cultural and literary researches flowed into and shaped key canonical works, Maureen McLane argues that romantic poetry's influences went far beyond the merely literary. Breathing life into the work of eighteenth-century balladeers and antiquarians, she addresses the revival of the ballad, the figure of the minstrel, and the prevalence of a 'minstrelsy complex' in romanticism. Furthermore, she envisages a new way of engaging with romantic poetics, encompassing both 'oral' and 'literary' modes of poetic construction, and anticipates the role that technology might play in a media-driven twenty-first century. The study will be of great interest to scholars and students of Romantic poetry, literature and culture.

This Companion brings together more than 60 distinguished contributors to offer a wide-ranging survey of the history of the English language, from its Indo-European and Germanic past, through British and American usage, to the rise of colonial and post-colonial English. Many of the essays investigate regional and ethnic varieties and take up issues of class and gender.

The book explores the many diverse approaches to the study of English in one volume, ranging from linguistics and etymology to the philosophy of language and literary history. Concise introductions place individual essays within larger contexts; notes on phonetics, a chronological list of events, and a glossary of linguistic terms facilitate use and connect the reader to the uses of the English language over the centuries.

A meeting ground for students of language and literature, this broad-ranging volume considers cultural, social, literary, material, and theoretical approaches to the study of language.

This book offers an imaginative new way of understanding the relationship between syntax and meter in Old English verse. It challenges the view that Old English poetry is composed in loose syntax to compensate for the strict requirements of prosody, such as meter and alliteration. The author proposes a "prosodical" syntax to replace the syntactic laws of Hans Kuhn through its greater accuracy and wider range of application. She formulates three concise rules that apply to the entire Old English poetic corpus.

The study of English language and literature in Britain changed dramatically between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. From Philology to English Studies explores the contribution of philology to this evolution. Haruko Momma charts both the rise and fall of philology from antiquity to the late eighteenth century, and the impact of modern philology on the study of modern languages and literatures. Focusing in detail on the work of key philologists in the nineteenth century, Momma considers how they shaped European discourse and especially vernacular studies in Britain: William Jones' discovery of Sanskrit in British India gave rise to Indo-European studies; Max Müller's study of this same language helped spread the Aryan myth to the English-speaking world; the OED achieved its greatness as a post-national lexicon through the editorship of the Scottish dialectologist.

Since the start of the financial crisis in 2008, the notion that capitalism has become too abstract for all but the most rarefied specialists to understand has been widely presupposed. Yet even in academic circles, the question of abstraction itself – of what exactly abstraction is, and does, under financialisation – seems to have gone largely unexplored – or has it? By putting the question of abstraction centre stage, How Abstract Is It? Thinking Capital Nowoffers an indispensable counterpoint to the ‘economic turn’ in the humanities, bringing together leading literary and cultural critics in order to propose that we may know far more about capital’s myriad abstractions than we typically think we do. Through in-depth engagement with classic and cutting-edge theorists, agile analyses of recent Hollywood films, groundbreaking readings of David Foster Wallace’s sprawling, unfinished novel, The Pale King, and even original poems, the contributors here suggest that the machinations and costs of finance – as well as alternatives to it – may already be hiding in plain sight. This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.

This collection brings together some of the most prominent critics of contemporary poetry and some of the most significant poets working in the English language today, to offer a critical assessment of the nature and function of poetic thought. Working at once with questions of form, literary theory and philosophy, this volume gives an extraordinarily diverse, original and mobile account of the kind of ‘thinking’ that poetry can do. The conviction that moves through the collection as a whole is that poetry is not an addition to thought, nor a vehicle to express a given idea, nor an ornamental language in which thinking might find itself couched. Rather, all the essays suggest that poetry itself thinks, in ways that other forms of expression cannot, thus making new intellectual, political and cultural formulations possible.

The recent enthusiasm for things postmodern has often produced a caricature of Modernism as monolithic and reactionary. Peter Nicholls argues instead that the distinctive feature of Modernism is its diversity. Through a lively analysis of each of Modernism's main literary movements, he explores the connections between the new stylistic developments and the shifting politics of gender and authority.

Nicholls introduces a wealth of literary experimentation, beginning with Baudelaire and Mallarmé and moving forward to the first avant-gardes. Close readings of key texts monitor the explosive histories of Futurism, Expressionism, Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism, histories that allow Anglo-American Modernism to be seen in a strikingly different light. In revealing Modernism's broad and varied terrain, Nicholls evokes the richness of a cultural moment that continues to shape our own.

In its playful and irreverent mash-up of voices and poetic traditions from across the Americas, Buzzing Hemisphere / Rumor Hemisférico imagines an alternative to the monolingualism of the U.S. literary and political landscape, and proposes a geo-neuro-political performance attuned to damaged or marginalized forms of knowledge, perception, and identity.

The first book-length study specifically devoted to Nuyorican poetry, In Visible Movement is unique in its historical and formal breadth, ranging from the foundational poets of the 1960s and 1970s to a variety of contemporary poets emerging in and around the Nuyorican Poets Cafe “slam” scene of the 1990s and early 2000s. 

Crystal Parikh contends that unlike humanitarianism, which views its objects as victims, human rights provide avenues for the creation of political subjects. Affiliating transnational works of American literature with decolonization, socialist, and other political struggles in the global south, she illuminates a human rights critique of idealized American rights and freedoms that have been globalized in the twenty-first century.  

In An Ethics of Betrayal, Crystal Parikh investigates the theme and tropes of betrayal and treason in Asian American and Chicano/Latino literary and cultural narratives. In considering betrayal from an ethical perspective, one grounded in the theories of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, Parikh argues that the minority subject is obligated in a primary, preontological, and irrecusable relation of responsibility to the Other. 

The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature offers an engaging survey of Asian American literature from the nineteenth century to the present day. Since the 1980s, Asian American literary studies has developed into a substantial and vibrant field within English and American Studies. This Companion explores the variety of historical periods, literary genres, and cultural movements affecting the development of Asian American literature. Written by a host of leading scholars in the field, this book provides insight into the representative movements, regional settings, archival resources, and critical reception that define Asian American literature. Covering subjects from immigrant narratives and internment literature to contemporary race studies and the problem of translation, this Companion provides insight into the myriad traditions that have shaped the Asian American literary landscape.

Literature has been essential to shaping the notions of human personhood, good life, moral responsibility, and forms of freedom that have been central to human rights law, discourse, and politics. The literary study of human rights has also recently generated innovative and timely perspectives on the history, meaning, and scope of human rights. The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights and Literature introduces this new and exciting field of study in the humanities. It explores the historical and institutional contexts, theoretical concepts, genres, and methods that literature and human rights share. Equally accessible to beginners in the field and more advanced researches, this Companion emphasizes both the literary and interdisciplinary dimensions of human rights and the humanities.

New York holds a special place in America's national mythology as both the gateway to the USA and as a diverse, vibrant cultural center distinct from the rest of the nation. From the international atmosphere of the Dutch colony New Amsterdam, through the expansion of the city in the nineteenth century, to its unique appeal to artists and writers in the twentieth, New York has given its writers a unique perspective on American culture. This Companion explores the range of writing and performance in the city, celebrating Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, Eugene O'Neill, and Allen Ginsberg among a host of authors who have contributed to the city's rich literary and cultural history. Illustrated and featuring a chronology and guide to further reading, this book is the ideal guide for students of American literature as well as for all who love New York and its writers

Since the nineteenth century, ideas centered on the individual, on Emersonian self-reliance, and on the right of the individual to the pursuit of happiness have had a tremendous presence in the United States—and even more so after the Reagan era. But has this presence been for the good of all? In Negative Liberties Cyrus R. K. Patell revises important ideas in the debate about individualism and the political theory of liberalism. He does so by adding two new voices to the current discussion—Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon—to examine the different ways in which their writings embody, engage, and critique the official narrative generated by U.S. liberal ideology. 

At the intersection of social and environmental history there has emerged a rich body of black literary response to natural and agricultural experiences, whether the legacy of enforced agricultural labor or of the destruction and displacement brought about by a hurricane. In Cultivation and Catastrophe, Sonya Posmentier uncovers a vivid diasporic tradition of black environmental writing that responds to the aftermath of plantation slavery, urbanization, and free and forced migrations. While humanist discourses of African American and postcolonial studies often sustain a line between nature and culture, this book instead emphasizes the relationship between them, offering an innovative environmental history of modern black literature.

The Scandal of the State is a revealing study of the relationship between the postcolonial, democratic Indian nation-state and Indian women’s actual needs and lives. Well-known for her work combining feminist theory and postcolonial studies, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan shows how the state is central to understanding women’s identities and how, reciprocally, women and “women’s issues” affect the state’s role and function. She argues that in India law and citizenship define for women not only the scope of political rights but also cultural identity and everyday life. Sunder Rajan delineates the postcolonial state in implicit contrast with the “enlightened,” postfeminist neoliberal state in the West. Her analysis wrestles with complex social realities, taking into account the influence of age, ethnicity, religion, and class on individual and group identities as well as the shifting, heterogeneous nature of the state itself.

The essays in this volume explore gender as a point of crisis in the cultural, social and political space of India. They attribute the existence of these crises to conflicts between gender, on the one hand, and family, community and nation on the other. These are then analysed in terms of female identity, subjectivity and agency within a narrative of historical modernity.

While secularism has been integral to India’s democracy for more than fifty years, its uses and limits are now being debated anew. Signs of a crisis in the relations between state, society, and religion include the violence directed against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 and the precarious situation of India’s minority religious groups more generally; the existence of personal laws that vary by religious community; the affiliation of political parties with fundamentalist religious organizations; and the rallying of a significant proportion of the diasporic Hindu community behind a resurgent nationalist Hinduism. There is a broad consensus that a crisis of secularism exists, but whether the state can resolve conflicts and ease tensions or is itself part of the problem is a matter of vigorous political and intellectual debate. In this timely, nuanced collection, twenty leading Indian cultural theorists assess the contradictory ideals, policies, and practices of secularism in India.

Writing Program Administration at Small Liberal Arts Colleges presents an empirical study of the writing programs at one hundred small, private liberal arts colleges. Jill M. Gladstein and Dara Rossman Regaignon provide detailed information about a type of writing program not often highlighted in the scholarly record and offer a model for such national, multi-institutional research. Utilizing the mixed methods approach of grounded theory, Gladstein and Regaignon weave together survey, interview, and focus group data, site document analysis, and institutional history. They describe the writing programs at small colleges today as being dominated by writing across the curriculum-based approaches to writing instruction and the writing centers as emphasizing peer tutoring, and hence the development of undergraduate students as leaders and scholars. For small colleges, the movement toward vertical writing curricula, professionalized leadership positions, and innovative writing assessments occurs when institutions deepen or reaffirm their commitment to writing across the curriculum. In addition, Writing Program Administration at Small Liberal Arts Colleges offers a heuristic for understanding and comparing writing programs within and across institutions.

Writing Program Administration at Small Liberal Arts Colleges presents an empirical study of the writing programs at one hundred small, private liberal arts colleges. Jill M. Gladstein and Dara Rossman Regaignon provide detailed information about a type of writing program not often highlighted in the scholarly record and offer a model for such national, multi-institutional research. Utilizing the mixed methods approach of grounded theory, Gladstein and Regaignon weave together survey, interview, and focus group data, site document analysis, and institutional history. They describe the writing programs at small colleges today as being dominated by writing across the curriculum-based approaches to writing instruction and the writing centers as emphasizing peer tutoring, and hence the development of undergraduate students as leaders and scholars. For small colleges, the movement toward vertical writing curricula, professionalized leadership positions, and innovative writing assessments occurs when institutions deepen or reaffirm their commitment to writing across the curriculum. In addition, Writing Program Administration at Small Liberal Arts Colleges offers a heuristic for understanding and comparing writing programs within and across institutions.

Many people in Great Britain and the United States can recall elderly relatives who remembered long stretches of verse learned at school decades earlier, yet most of us were never required to recite in class. Heart Beats is the first book to examine how poetry recitation came to assume a central place in past curricular programs, and to investigate when and why the once-mandatory exercise declined. Telling the story of a lost pedagogical practice and its wide-ranging effects on two sides of the Atlantic, Catherine Robson explores how recitation altered the ordinary people who committed poems to heart, and changed the worlds in which they lived. 

Heart Beats begins by investigating recitation's progress within British and American public educational systems over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and weighs the factors that influenced which poems were most frequently assigned. Robson then scrutinizes the recitational fortunes of three short works that were once classroom classics: Felicia Hemans's "Casabianca," Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," and Charles Wolfe's "Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna." To conclude, the book considers W. E. Henley's "Invictus" and Rudyard Kipling's "If--," asking why the idea of the memorized poem arouses such different responses in the United States and Great Britain today.

Focusing on vital connections between poems, individuals, and their communities, Heart Beats is an important study of the history and power of memorized poetry.

The Ninth Edition offers more complete works and more teachable groupings than ever before, the apparatus you trust, and a new, free Supplemental Ebook with more than 1,000 additional texts. Read by more than 8 million students, The Norton Anthology of English Literature sets the standard and remains an unmatched value.

This book presents a series of narratives that reflect the compelling and sometimes dangerous allure of the world of books - and the world in books - in late-medieval Britain. It envisions the confines of medieval manuscripts as virtual worlds: realms that readers call forth through imaginative interactions with books' material features.

In Faces of Charisma: Image, Text, Object in Byzantium and the Medieval West, a multi-disciplinary group of scholars advances the theory that charisma may be a quality of art as well as of person. Beginning with the argument that Weberian charisma of person is itself a matter of representation, this volume shows that to study charismatic art is to experiment with a theory of representation that allows for the possibility of nothing less than a breakdown between art and viewer and between art and lived experience. The volume examines charismatic works of literature, visual art, and architecture from England, Northern Europe, Italy, Ancient Greece, and Constantinople and from time periods ranging from antiquity to the beginning of the early modern period. 

Fieldworks offer a historical account of the social, rhetorical and material attempts to ground art and poetry in the physicality of a site.

Ernst Moiré was a mysterious Swiss photographer whose career has been obscured by silence, documentary voids, and misinformation. So much of his life is shrouded in speculation and half-truths that he sometimes seems more like a phantasm than the flesh-and-blood figure who will forever be remembered as the inadvertent inventor of the blur that bears his name.

A system can describe what we see (the solar system), operate a computer (Windows 10), or be made on a page (the fourteen engineered lines of a sonnet). In this book, Clifford Siskin shows that system is best understood as a genre—a form that works physically in the world to mediate our efforts to understand it. Indeed, many Enlightenment authors published works they called “system” to compete with the essay and the treatise. Drawing on the history of system from Galileo’s “message from the stars” and Newton’s “system of the world” to today’s “computational universe,” Siskin illuminates the role that the genre of system has played in the shaping and reshaping of modern knowledge. 

Debates about the nature of the Enlightenment date to the eighteenth century, when Imanual Kant himself addressed the question, “What is Enlightenment?” The contributors to this ambitious book offer a paradigm-shifting answer to that now-famous query: Enlightenment is an event in the history of mediation. Enlightenment, they argue, needs to be engaged within the newly broad sense of mediation introduced here—not only oral, visual, written, and printed media, but everything that intervenes, enables, supplements, or is simply in between. 

So write women’s studies pioneer Catharine R. Stimpson and anthropologist Gilbert Herdt in their introduction to Critical Terms for the Study of Gender, laying out the wide-ranging nature of this interdisciplinary and rapidly changing field. The sixth in the series of “Critical Terms” books, this volume provides an indispensable introduction to the study of gender through an exploration of key terms that are a part of everyday discourse in this vital subject.

How does the literature and culture of early Victorian Britain look different if viewed from below? Exploring the interplay between canonical social problem novels and the journalism and fiction appearing in the periodical press associated with working-class protest movements, Gregory Vargo challenges long-held assumptions about the cultural separation between the “two nations” of rich and poor in the Victorian era. The flourishing radical press was home to daring literary experiments that embraced themes including empire and economic inequality, helping to shape mainstream literature. Reconstructing social and institutional networks that connected middle-class writers to the world of working-class politics, this book reveals for the first time acknowledged and unacknowledged debts to the radical canon in the work of such authors as Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, Harriet Martineau and Elizabeth Gaskell. What emerges is a new vision of Victorian social life, in which fierce debates and surprising exchanges spanned the class divide.

The first collection of its kind, Chartist Drama makes available four plays written or performed by members of the Chartist movement of the 1840s. Emerging from the lively counter-culture of this protest campaign for democratic rights, these plays challenged cultural as well as political hierarchies by adapting such recognisable genres as melodrama, history plays, and tragedy for performance in radically new settings. They include poet-activist John Watkins's John Frost, which dramatises the gripping events of the Newport rising, in which twenty-two Chartists lost their lives in what was probably a misfired attempt to spark a nationwide rebellion. Gregory Vargo's introduction and notes elucidate the previously unexplored world of Chartist dramatic culture, a context that promises to reshape what we know about early Victorian popular politics and theatre.

New York holds a special place in America's national mythology as both the gateway to the USA and as a diverse, vibrant cultural center distinct from the rest of the nation. From the international atmosphere of the Dutch colony New Amsterdam, through the expansion of the city in the nineteenth century, to its unique appeal to artists and writers in the twentieth, New York has given its writers a unique perspective on American culture. This Companion explores the range of writing and performance in the city, celebrating Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, Eugene O'Neill, and Allen Ginsberg among a host of authors who have contributed to the city's rich literary and cultural history. Illustrated and featuring a chronology and guide to further reading, this book is the ideal guide for students of American literature as well as for all who love New York and its writers

In the 1790s, a single conversational circle―the Friendly Club―united New York City's most ambitious young writers, and in Republic of Intellect, Bryan Waterman uses an innovative blend of literary criticism and historical narrative to re-create the club's intellectual culture. The story of the Friendly Club reveals the mutually informing conditions of authorship, literary association, print culture, and production of knowledge in a specific time and place―the tumultuous, tenuous world of post-revolutionary New York City. More than any similar group in the early American republic, the Friendly Club occupied a crossroads―geographical, professional, and otherwise―of American literary and intellectual culture.

Two kids in their early twenties walk down the Bowery on a spring afternoon, just as the proprietor of a club hangs a sign with the new name for his venue. The place will be called CBGB which, he tells them, stands for "Country Bluegrass and Blues." That's exactly the sort of stuff they play, they lie, somehow managing to get a gig out of him. After the first show their band, Television, lands a regular string of Sundays. By the end of the summer a scene has developed that includes Tom Verlaine's new love interest, a poet-turned-rock chanteuse named Patti Smith. American punk rock is born.
Bryan Waterman peels back the layers of the origin myth and, assembling a rich historical archive, situates Marquee Moon in a broader cultural history of SoHo and the East Village. As Waterman traces the downtown scene's influences, public image, and reputation via a range of print, film, and audio recordings we come to recognize the real historical surprises that the documentary evidence still has to yield.

 In The New Asian City, Jini Kim Watson provides an innovative approach to how we might better understand the gleaming Asian Tiger metropolises of Seoul, Taipei, and Singapore. In doing so, Watson demonstrates how reading cultural production in conjunction with built environments can enrich our knowledge of the lived consequences of rapid economic and urban development. 

How did the Cold War shape culture and political power in decolonizing countries and give rise to authoritarian regimes in the so-called free world? Cold War Reckonings tells a new story about the Cold War and the global shift from colonialism to independent nation-states. Assembling a body of transpacific cultural works that speak to this historical conjuncture, Jini Kim Watson reveals autocracy to be not a deficient form of liberal democracy, but rather the result of Cold War entanglements with decolonization.

Focusing on East and Southeast Asia, the book scrutinizes cultural texts ranging from dissident poetry, fiction, and writers’ conference proceedings of the Cold War period, to more recent literature, graphic novels, and films that retrospectively look back to these decades with a critical eye. Cold War Reckonings argues that the cultural forms and narrative techniques that emerged from the Cold War-decolonizing matrix offer new ways of comprehending these histories and connecting them to our present. The book advances our understanding of the global reverberations of the Cold War and its enduring influence on cultural and political formations in the Asia Pacific.

Many of the most influential frameworks of postcolonial theory were developed from the 1970s to 1990s, during what we may now recognize as the twilight of the postwar period. If forms of capitalist imperialism are entering into new configurations of neoliberal privatization, wars-without-end, xenophobic nationalism, and unsustainable extraction, what aspects of postcolonial inquiry must be reworked or revised in order to grasp our political present?

In twelve essays that draw from a number of disciplines—history, anthropology, literature, geography, indigenous studies— and regional locations (the Black Atlantic, South Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Australia, Argentina) The Postcolonial Contemporary seeks to move beyond the habitual oppositions that have often characterized the field: universal vs. particular; Marxism vs. postcolonialism; politics vs. culture. The essays reckon with new and persisting postcolonial predicaments, doing so under four interrelated analytics: postcolonial temporality; deprovincializing the global south; beyond Marxism versus postcolonial studies; and postcolonial spatiality and new political imaginaries.

Postdramatic theatre is an essential category of performance that challenges classical elements of drama, including the centrality of plot and character. Tracking key developments in contemporary European and North American performance, this collection, co-written with Michael Shane Boyle and Matt Cornish, redirects ongoing debates about postdramatic theatre, turning attention to the overlooked issue on which they hinge: form.

Contributors draw on literary studies, film studies and critical theory to reimagine the formal aspects of theatre, such as space, media and text. The volume expands how scholars think of theatrical form, insisting that formalist analysis can be useful for studying the ways theatre is produced and consumed, and how theatre makers engage with other forms like dance and visual art. Chapters focus on a range of interdisciplinary artists including Tadeusz Kantor, Ann Liv Young and Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch, as well as theatre's enmeshment within institutional formations like funding agencies, festivals, real estate and healthcare.

A timely investigation of the aesthetic structures and material conditions of contemporary performance, this collection refines what we mean, and what we don't, when we speak of postdramatic theatre.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, political and economic agendas in the reunified German capital have worked to dismantle long-standing traditions of state-subsidized theater even as the city has redefined itself as a global arts epicenter. Institutional Theatrics charts the ways theater artists have responded to these shifts and crises both onstage and off, offering a method for rethinking the theater as a vital public institution.  
 
What is the future of the German theater, grounded historically in large ensembles, extensive repertoires, and auteur directors? Examining the restructuring of Berlin’s theatrical landscape and most prominent performance venues, Brandon Woolf argues that cultural policy is not simply the delegation and distribution of funds. Instead, policy should be thought of as an artistic practice of institutional imagination. Woolf demonstrates how performance can critique its patron institutions in order to transform the relations between the stage and the state, between the theater and the infrastructures of its support. 

Empire, Colony, Postcolony provides a clear exposition of the historical, political and ideological dimensions of colonialism, imperialism, and postcolonialism, with clear explanations of these categories, which relate their histories to contemporary political issues. The book analyzes major concepts and explains the meaning of key terms.

Postcolonialism explores the political, social, and cultural effects of decolonization, continuing the anti-colonial challenge to western dominance. This lively and innovative account of both the history and key debates of postcolonialism discusses its importance as an historical condition, and as a means of changing the way we think about the world. Key concepts and issues are considered, with reference to particular cultural and historical examples, such as the status of aboriginal people, cultural nomadism, Western feminism, the innovative fiction of Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie, and the postcolonial cities of London, Bombay and Cairo. The work of theorists such as Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and Gayatri Spivak are woven into the discussion, making this fascinating subject relevant and accessible to a wider audience.

In this major contribution to debates about English identity, leading theorist Robert J.C. Young argues that Englishness was never really about England at all. In the nineteenth century, it was rather developed as a form of long-distance identity for the English diaspora around the world. Young shows how the effects of this continue to reverberate today, nationally and globally.

This key new introduction, by one of the leading exponents in the field, explains in clear and accessible language the historical and theoretical origins of post-colonial theory. Acknowledging that post-colonial theory draws on a wide, often contested, range of theory from different fields, Young analyzes the concepts and issues involved, explains the meaning of key terms, and interprets the work of some of the major writers concerned, to provide an ideal introductory guide for those undergraduates or academics coming to post-colonial theory and criticism for the first time.

What is the relation of politics to theory? Theories make political claims, theorists make political critiques, and academics use theory in the pursuit of institutional ends: theory is not only "about" politics but is itself a political practice. Politics and theory, like high art and popular culture, are marked by a common dialectic: in Adorno's famous phrase, they bear the stigmata of capitalism - are torn halves of a system which doesn't add up. Robert Young's critique of the politics of theory shows how the dynamics of this schism are repeated in contemporary debates about historicism, psychoanalysis, racism, and the academic institution itself. In their dialectics of identity and difference, power and resistance, subversion and containment, north and south, centre and margin - the heart of contemporary political and theoretical debate - today's cultural theories themselves act out the torn halves of a conflictual culture. But, Young argues, if theory repeats the irreconcilable antagonisms of late capitalism, then it must also renew its politics of protest against diaspora, deprivation and despair.

The work of Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist and anti-colonialist activist who died prematurely in 1961 at the age of 36, has marked generations of anti-colonialists, civil rights activists and specialists in postcolonial studies. Since the publication of his books (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952; The Year V of the Algerian Revolution, 1959; The Damned of the Earth, 1961), it was known that many of his writings remained unpublished or inaccessible. In particular his psychiatric writings, including those devoted to "colonialist alienation seen through mental illness" (in the words of its editor François Maspero). This material constitutes the heart of this volume, drawn up and presented following a patient work of collecting and a long research by Jean Khalfa and Robert JC Young. The reader will find there the scientific articles of Fanon, his thesis in psychiatry, as well as certain unpublished texts and texts published in the interior journal of the hospital of Blida-Joinville where he practiced from 1953 to 1956. There will also be two pieces. written during his medical studies (L'Oeil se nie and Les Mains parallèles), the correspondence that could be found as well as certain texts published in El Moudjahid after 1958, not included in Pour la Révolution africaine (1964). This remarkable collection is completed by the correspondence between François Maspero and the writer Giovanni Pirelli for a project to publish Fanon's complete works, as well as by the reasoned analysis of the latter's library.