The first comprehensive analysis of English national identity in the late Middle Ages

During the late Middle Ages, the increasing expansion of administrative, legal, and military systems by a central government, together with the greater involvement of the commons in national life, brought England closer than ever to political nationhood. Examining a diverse array of texts—ranging from Latin and vernacular historiography to Lollard tracts, Ricardian poetry, and chivalric treatises—this volume reveals the variety of forms “England” assumed when it was imagined in the medieval West.

These essays disrupt conventional thinking about the relationship between premodernity and modernity, challenge traditional preconceptions regarding the origins of the nation, and complicate theories about the workings of nationalism. Imagining a Medieval English Nation is not only a collection of new readings of major canonical works by leading medievalists, it is among the first book-length analyses on the subject and of critical interest. Contributors: Kathleen Davis, Bucknell U; L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, U of California, Santa Barbara; Andrew Galloway, Cornell U; Jill C. Havens, Baylor U; Peggy A. Knapp, Carnegie Mellon U; Larry Scanlon, Rutgers U; D. Vance Smith, Princeton U; Claire Sponsler, U of Iowa; Lynn Staley, Colgate U; Thorlac Turville-Petre, U of Nottingham.

Imagining Iberia in English and Castilian Medieval Romance offers a broad disciplinary, linguistic, and national focus by analyzing the literary depiction of Iberia in two European vernaculars that have rarely been studied together. Emily Houlik-Ritchey employs an innovative comparative methodology that integrates the understudied Castilian literary tradition with English literature. Intentionally departing from the standard “influence and transmission” approach, Imagining Iberia challenges that standard discourse with modes drawn from Neighbor Theory to reveal and navigate the relationships among three selected medieval romance traditions. This welcome volume uncovers an overemphasis in prior scholarship on the relevance of “crusading” agendas in medieval romance, and highlights the shared investments of Christians and Muslims in Iberia’s political, creedal, cultural, and mercantile networks in the Mediterranean world.

Forests have always been more than just their trees. The forests in Michigan (and similar forests in other Great Lakes states such as Wisconsin and Minnesota) played a role in the American cultural imagination from the beginnings of European settlement in the early nineteenth century to the present. Our relationships with those forests have been shaped by the cultural attitudes of the times, and people have invested in them both moral and spiritual meanings.

Author John Knott draws upon such works as Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory and Robert Pogue Harrison's Forests: The Shadow of Civilization in exploring ways in which our
relationships with forests have been shaped, using Michigan---its history of settlement, popular literature, and forest management controversies---as an exemplary case. Knott looks at such well-known figures as William Bradford, James Fenimore Cooper, John Muir, John Burroughs, and Teddy Roosevelt; Ojibwa conceptions of the forest and natural world (including how Longfellow mythologized them); early explorer accounts; and contemporary literature set in the Upper Peninsula, including Jim Harrison's True North and Philip Caputo's Indian Country.

Two competing metaphors evolved over time, Knott shows: the forest as howling wilderness, impeding the progress of civilization and in need of subjugation, and the forest as temple or cathedral, worthy of reverence and protection. Imagining the Forestshows the origin and development of both.

Wild Bill’s ever-evolving legend

When it came to the Wild West, the nineteenth-century press rarely let truth get in the way of a good story. James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok’s story was no exception. Mythologized and sensationalized, Hickok was turned into the deadliest gunfighter of all, a so-called moral killer, a national phenomenon even while he was alive.

Rather than attempt to tease truth from fiction, coauthors Paul Ashdown and Edward Caudill investigate the ways in which Hickok embodied the culture of glamorized violence Americans embraced after the Civil War and examine the process of how his story emerged, evolved, and turned into a viral multimedia sensation full of the excitement, danger, and romance of the West.

Journalists, the coauthors demonstrate, invented “Wild Bill” Hickok, glorifying him as a civilizer. They inflated his body count and constructed his legend in the midst of an emerging celebrity culture that grew up around penny newspapers. His death by treachery, at a relatively young age, made the story tragic, and dime-store novelists took over where the press left off. Reimagined as entertainment, Hickok’s legend continued to enthrall Americans in literature, on radio, on television, and in the movies, and it still draws tourists to notorious Deadwood, South Dakota.

American culture often embraces myths that later become accepted as popular history. By investigating the allure and power of Hickok’s myth, Ashdown and Caudill explain how American journalism and popular culture have shaped the way Civil War–era figures are remembered and reveal how Americans have embraced violence as entertainment.
 

In a groundbreaking work of “New Americanist” studies, John R. Eperjesi explores the cultural and economic formation of the Unites States relationship to China and the Pacific Rim in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Eperjesi examines a variety of texts to explore the emergence of what Rob Wilson has termed the “American Pacific.” Eperjesi shows how works ranging from Frank Norris’ The Octopus to the Journal of the American Asiatic Association, from the Socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason to the travel writings of Jack and Charmain London, and from Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men to Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—and the cultural dynamics that produced them—helped construct the myth of the American Pacific. By construing the Pacific Rim as a unified region binding together the territorial United States with the areas of Asia and the Pacific, he also demonstrates that the logic of the imperialist imaginary suggested it was not only proper but even incumbent upon the United States to exercise both political and economic influence in the region. As Donald E. Pease notes in his foreword, “by reading foreign policy and economic policy as literature, and by reconceptualizing works of American literature as extenuations of foreign policy and economic theory,” Eperjesi makes a significant contribution to studies of American imperialism.

Westward expansion on the North American continent by European settlers generated a flurry of writings on the frontier experience over the course of a hundred years. Asserting that the dominant ideology of America’s Manifest Destiny embodied a tense, often contradictory union of Christian and secular republican views of social progress, In the Work of Their Hands Is Their Prayer investigates the ambivalence of the frontier as it was inscribed with redemptive, historical significance by a host of frontier writers.

Enlisting canonical and noncanonical sources, Joel Daehnke examines the manner in which the imagery of the human figure at work and play in the frontier landscape participated in the nationalist, “civilizing” project of westward expansion. While he acknowledges the growing secularization of American life, Professor Daehnke surveys the continuing claims of the Christian redemptive scheme as a powerful symbolic domain for these writers’ meditations on social progress and the potential for human perfectibility in the landscapes of the West.

Whether discussing the Edenic imagery of women’s gardens, the advocacy of an ethics of land use, or the affairs of fortune in the mining districts of Nevada, In the Work of Their Hands Is Their Prayer presents an enlightening reexamination of an American ideology of progress and its enduring fascination with mission, Manifest Destiny, and the ends of history.

In the Work of Their Hands Is Their Prayer is a welcome addition to the extended library of critical attention to the ideology, history, and literary traditions of the American frontier.

Since the 1960s, Nuyorican poets have explored and performed Puerto Rican identity both on and off the page. Emerging within and alongside the civil rights movements of the 1960s, the foundational Nuyorican writers sought to counter the ethnic/racial and institutional invisibility of New York City Puerto Ricans by documenting the reality of their communities in innovative and sometimes challenging ways. Since then, Nuyorican poetry has entered the U.S. Latino literary canon and has gained prominence in light of the spoken-word revival of the past two decades, a movement spearheaded by the Nuyorican Poetry Slams of the 1990s. Today, Nuyorican poetry engages with contemporary social issues such as the commodification of the body, the institutionalization of poetry, the gentrification of the barrio, and the national and global marketing of identity. What has not changed is a continued shared investment in a poetics that links the written word and the performing body.

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. It also unearths a largely unknown corpus of poetry performances, reading over forty years of Nuyorican poetry at the intersection of the printed and performed word, underscoring the poetry’s links to vernacular and Afro-Puerto Rican performance cultures, from the island’s oral poets to the New York sounds and rhythms of Latin boogaloo, salsa, and hip-hop. With depth and insight, Urayoán Noel analyzes various canonical Nuyorican poems by poets such as Pedro Pietri, Victor Hernández Cruz, Miguel Algarín, Miguel Piñero, Sandra María Esteves, and Tato Laviera. He discusses historically overlooked poets such as Lorraine Sutton, innovative poets typically read outside the Nuyorican tradition such as Frank Lima and Edwin Torres, and a younger generation of Nuyorican-identified poets including Willie Perdomo, María Teresa Mariposa Fernández, and Emanuel Xavier, whose work has received only limited critical consideration. The result is a stunning reflection of how New York Puerto Rican poets have addressed the complexity of identity amid diaspora for over forty years.

A 2012 CHOICE “Outstanding Academic Title“

A new historical approach to Indian English literature

Mary Ellis Gibson shows that poetry, not fiction, was the dominant literary genre of Indian writing in English until 1860 and that poetry written in colonial situations can tell us as much or even more about figuration, multilingual literacies, and histories of nationalism than novels can. Gibson re-creates the historical webs of affiliation and resistance that were experienced by writers in colonial India—writers of British, Indian, and mixed ethnicities.

Advancing new theoretical and historical paradigms for reading colonial literatures, Indian Angles makes accessible many writers heretofore neglected or virtually unknown. Gibson recovers texts by British women, by nonelite British men, and by persons who would, in the nineteenth century, have been called Eurasian. Her work traces the mutually constitutive history of English-language poets from Sir William Jones to Toru Dutt and Rabindranath Tagore. Drawing on contemporary postcolonial theory, her work also provides new ways of thinking about British internal colonialism as its results were exported to South Asia.

In lucid and accessible prose, Gibson presents a new theoretical approach to colonial and postcolonial literatures.

Padrón reveals the evolution of Spain’s imagining of the New World as a space in continuity with Asia.

Narratives of Europe’s westward expansion often tell of how the Americas came to be known as a distinct landmass, separate from Asia and uniquely positioned as new ground ripe for transatlantic colonialism. But this geographic vision of the Americas was not shared by all Europeans. While some imperialists imagined North and Central America as undiscovered land, the Spanish pushed to define the New World as part of a larger and eminently flexible geography that they called las Indias, and that by right, belonged to the Crown of Castile and León. Las Indias included all of the New World as well as East and Southeast Asia, although Spain’s understanding of the relationship between the two areas changed as the realities of the Pacific Rim came into sharper focus. At first, the Spanish insisted that North and Central America were an extension of the continent of Asia. Eventually, they came to understand East and Southeast Asia as a transpacific extension of their empire in America called las Indias del poniente, or the Indies of the Setting Sun.

The Indies of the Setting Sun charts the Spanish vision of a transpacific imperial expanse, beginning with Balboa’s discovery of the South Sea and ending almost a hundred years later with Spain’s final push for control of the Pacific. Padrón traces a series of attempts—both cartographic and discursive—to map the space from Mexico to Malacca, revealing the geopolitical imaginations at play in the quest for control of the New World and Asia.

From authors of bodice rippers and gallant figures to hometown poetry, hearty men, and tales of American originals, the history of literature in Michigan is deep and rich. The Wolverine State has been the birthplace, home, and inspiration to a tremendous number of men and women of letters, both the well-known and the obscure. Ink Trails II tells the stories of these fascinating and diverse writers whose talent is inextricably linked to Michigan.
Exploring the hidden treasures of otherwise forgotten authors while also acknowledging the Michigan-set stories of giants like Hemingway, Dave and Jack Dempsey delve into the state’s literary heritage, as robust, diverse, and inexhaustible as the natural beauty of the place that nurtured it. This second volume of “ink trails” continues to tell the story of the remarkable writers, powerful words, and sublime nature of Michigan in the same well-researched and entertaining prose as the first.

Long revered as the birthplace of many of the nation’s best-known authors, Michigan has also served as inspiration to countless others. In this entertaining and well-researched book—the first of its kind—the secrets, legends, and myths surrounding some of Michigan’s literary luminaries are explored. Which Michigan poet inspired a state law requiring teachers to assign at least one of his compositions to all students? Which young author emerged from the University of Michigan with a bestselling novel derided by some critics as “vulgar”? And from what Michigan city did Arthur Miller, Robert Frost, and Jane Kenyon draw vital inspiration? The answers to these questions and more are revealed in this rich literary history that highlights the diversity of those whose impact on letters has been indelible and distinctly Michiganian.

A deconstruction of the strategies used to shape the image of a powerful woman ruler

As queen of Spain, Isabel I of Castile (known to history as Isabella the Catholic, 1474–1504) oversaw the creation of Europe’s first nation-state and laid the foundations for its emergence as the largest empire the West has ever known—nearly a century before the better-known and more widely studied Elizabeth I of England.

What we know of this remarkable ruler is typically gleaned from hagiographic texts that negate her power and accept her own propagandistic self-fashioning as legitimate heir, pious princess, devoted wife, and heaven-sent healer of the wounds inflicted on Spain’s body politic by impotent kings, seditious nobles, and such undesirable others as Jews, Muslims, and sodomites. Isabel Rules is the first book to examine the formation of the queen’s public image, focusing on strategies designed to cope with the ideological and cultural dissonance created by the combination of her gender and her profoundly patriarchal political program for unifying and purifying Spain.Barbara Weissberger identifies two primary and interrelated strategies among the supporters of the queen—often writing in her employ—and her critics. Her loyalists use Marian imagery to portray Isabel as a pious, chaste, and submissive queen consort to her husband Ferdinand, while her opponents imagine the queen as a voracious and lascivious whore whose illicit power threatens the virility of her male subjects and inverts the traditional gender hierarchy. Weissberger applies a materialist feminist perspective to a wide array of texts of the second half of the fifteenth century in order to uncover and study the masculine psychosexual anxiety created by Isabel’s anomalous power. She then demonstrates the persistence of the two sides of the propagandistic construction of the Catholic queen, reviewing modern treatments in Francoist schoolbooks and in the fiction of Juan Goytisolo, Alejo Carpentier, and Salman Rushdie.