Latinx peoples and culture have permeated Shakespearean performance in the United States for over 75 years—a phenomenon that, until now, has been largely overlooked as Shakespeare studies has taken a global turn in recent years. Author Carla Della Gatta argues that theater-makers and historians must acknowledge this presence and influence in order to truly engage the complexity of American Shakespeares. Latinx Shakespeares investigates the history, dramaturgy, and language of the more than 140 Latinx-themed Shakespearean productions in the United States since the 1960s—the era of West Side Story. This first-ever book of Latinx representation in the most-performed playwright’s canon offers a new methodology for reading ethnic theater looks beyond the visual to prioritize aural signifiers such as music, accents, and the Spanish language.
The book’s focus is on textual adaptations or performances in which Shakespearean plays, stories, or characters are made Latinx through stage techniques, aesthetics, processes for art-making (including casting), and modes of storytelling. The case studies range from performances at large repertory theaters to small community theaters and from established directors to emerging playwrights. To analyze these productions, the book draws on interviews with practitioners, script analysis, first-hand practitioner insight, and interdisciplinary theoretical lenses, largely by scholars of color. Latinx Shakespeares moves toward healing by reclaiming Shakespeare as a borrower, adapter, and creator of language whose oeuvre has too often been mobilized in the service of a culturally specific English-language whiteness that cannot extricate itself from its origins within the establishment of European/British colonialism/imperialism.There is a large intelligence present in Terese Svoboda's poetry and not a shred of sentimentality. From the dramatic coming-of-age in the title poem to the question posed in the last section, "What will I say to my child as it snows / that last winter's papery afterglow?" she continually searches for a responsible, compassionate world, one in which the only illusion is art.
The mythological central poem, "The Ranchhand's Daughter," shows the gods of isolation and incest warring against each other, destroying a triangle of love and cut into the granite-faced Badlands. It is only in the sensuous landscape of the domestic that possible redemption occurs: the father who dreams of running for president, the mother who signs in the mirror, the couple in the shower with "confidence rising between them." Faced with the inevitable losses, Svoboda strives for meaning and beauty.
Winner of the 2008 Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award
Prior to the civil rights movement, comedians performed for audiences that were clearly delineated by race. Black comedians performed for black audiences and white comedians performed for whites. Yet during the past forty-five years, black comics have become progressively more central to mainstream culture.
In Laughing Mad , Bambi Haggins looks at how this transition occurred in a variety of media and shows how this integration has paved the way for black comedians and their audiences to affect each other. Historically, African American performers have been able to use comedy as a pedagogic tool, interjecting astute observations about race relations while the audience is laughing. And yet, Haggins makes the convincing argument that the potential of African American comedy remains fundamentally unfulfilled as the performance of blackness continues to be made culturally digestible for mass consumption.
Rather than presenting biographies of individual performers, Haggins focuses on the ways in which the comic persona is constructed and changes across media, from stand-up, to the small screen, to film. She examines the comic televisual and cinematic personae of Dick Gregory, Bill Cosby, Flip Wilson, and Richard Pryor and considers how these figures set the stage for black comedy in the next four decades. She reads Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock as emblematic of the first and second waves of post-civil rights era African American comedy, and she looks at the socio-cultural politics of Whoopi Goldberg's comic persona through the lens of gender and crossover. Laughing Mad also explores how the comedy of Dave Chappelle speaks to and for the post-soul generation.
A rigorous analytic analysis, this book interrogates notions of identity, within both the African American community and mainstream popular culture. Written in engaging and accessible prose, it is also a book that will travel from the seminar room, to the barbershop, to the kitchen table, allowing readers to experience the sketches, stand-up, and film comedies with all the laughter they deserve.
Adventurous and perceptive, Laughing to Keep from Dying reveals how African American satirists unmask the illusions and anxieties surrounding race in the twenty-first century.
One of America’s most eminent nature poets, Robert Pack has won the acclaim of writers, critics, and readers from Stephen Jay Gould to Mark Strand. In his latest collection, Laughter Before Sleep, Pack carries on his themes of family and friends, responsibility to the natural world of evolved diversity, the transience of life, the fragility of happiness, and the consolations offered by art and music.
The role of religion in early American literature has been endlessly studied; the role of the law has been virtually ignored. Robert A. Ferguson’s book seeks to correct this imbalance.
With the Revolution, Ferguson demonstrates, the lawyer replaced the clergyman as the dominant intellectual force in the new nation. Lawyers wrote the first important plays, novels, and poems; as gentlemen of letters they controlled many of the journals and literary societies; and their education in the law led to a controlling aesthetic that shaped both the civic and the imaginative literature of the early republic. An awareness of this aesthetic enables us to see works as diverse as Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and Irving’s burlesque History of New York as unified texts, products of the legal mind of the time.
The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the great political orations were written by lawyers, and so too were the literary works of Trumbull, Tyler, Brackenridge, Charles Brockden Brown, William Cullen Bryant, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and a dozen other important writers. To recover the original meaning and context of these writings is to gain new understanding of a whole era of American culture.
The nexus of law and letters persisted for more than a half-century. Ferguson explores a range of factors that contributed to its gradual dissolution: the yielding of neoclassicism to romanticism; the changing role of the writer; the shift in the lawyer’s stance from generalist to specialist and from ideological spokesman to tactician of compromise; the onslaught of Jacksonian democracy and the problems of a country torn by sectional strife. At the same time, he demonstrates continuities with the American Renaissance. And in Abraham Lincoln he sees a memorable late flowering of the earlier tradition.
The Law of the Heart is a vigorous challenge to the prevailing concept of the “antidemocratic” image of the self in the American literary and cultural tradition. Sam B. Girgus counters this interpretation and attempts to develop a new understanding of democratic individualism and liberal humanism in American literature under the rubric of literary modernism.
The image of the individual self who retreats inward, conforming to a distorted “law of the heart,” emerges from the works of such writers as Cooper and Poe and composer Charles Ives. Yet, as Girgus shows, other American writers relate the idea of the self to reality and culture in a more complex way: the self confronts and is reconciled to the paradox of history and reality.
In Girgus’ view, the tradition of pragmatic, humanistic individualism provides a foundation for a future where individual liberty is a major priority. He uses literary modernism as a bridge for relating contemporary social conditions to crises of the American self and culture as seen in the works of writers including Emerson, Howells, Whitman, Henry James, William James, Fitzgerald, Bellow, and McLuhan.
In an American society both increasingly diverse and increasingly segregated, the signals children receive about race are more confusing than ever. In this context, how do children negotiate and make meaning of multiple and conflicting messages to develop their own ideas about race? Learning Race, Learning Place engages this question using in-depth interviews with an economically diverse group of African American children and their mothers.
Through these rich narratives, Erin N. Winkler seeks to reorient the way we look at how children develop their ideas about race through the introduction of a new framework—comprehensive racial learning—that shows the importance of considering this process from children’s points of view and listening to their interpretations of their experiences, which are often quite different from what the adults around them expect or intend. At the children’s prompting, Winkler examines the roles of multiple actors and influences, including gender, skin tone, colorblind rhetoric, peers, family, media, school, and, especially, place. She brings to the fore the complex and understudied power of place, positing that while children’s racial identities and experiences are shaped by a national construction of race, they are also specific to a particular place that exerts both direct and indirect influence on their racial identities and ideas.
Since the mid-1960s, the war on crime has reshaped public attitudes about state authority, criminal behavior, and the responsibilities of citizenship. But how have American writers grappled with these changes? What happens when a journalist approaches the workings of organized crime not through its legendary Godfathers but through a workaday, low-level figure who informs on his mob? Why is it that interrogation scenes have become so central to prime-time police dramas of late? What is behind writers’ recent fascination with “cold case” homicides, with private security, or with prisons?
In Learning to Live with Crime, Christopher P. Wilson examines this war on crime and how it has made its way into cultural representation and public consciousness. Under the sway of neoconservative approaches to criminal justice and public safety, Americans have been urged to see crime as an inevitable risk of modern living and to accept ever more aggressive approaches to policing, private security, and punishment. The idea has been not simply to fight crime but to manage its risks; to inculcate personal vigilance in citizens; and to incorporate criminals’ knowledge through informants and intelligence gathering. At its most scandalous, this study suggests, contemporary law enforcement has even come to mimic crime’s own operations.
In his third collection of poems Todd Davis advises us that "the only corruption comes / in not loving this life enough." Over the course of this masterful and heartfelt book it becomes clear that Davis not only loves the life he's been given, but also believes that the ravishing desire of this world can offer hope, and even joy, however it might be negotiated.
Drawing upon a range of stories from the Christian, Transcendental, and Asian traditions, as well as from his own deep understanding of the natural world, Davis explores the connection between the visible and invisible worlds, or what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called "the incandescent surface of matter plunged in God."
A direct poetic descendant of Walt Whitman, Davis invites us to sing "the songs we collect in the hymnals of our flesh- / impromptu, a cappella, our mouths flung open / in a great wide O."
In May 1860, Walt Whitman published a third edition of Leaves of Grass. His timing was compelling. Printed during a period of regional, ideological, and political divisions, written by a poet intimately concerned with the idea of a United States as “essentially the greatest poem,” this new edition was Whitman’s last best hope for national salvation. Now available in a facsimile edition, Leaves of Grass, 1860 faithfully reproduces Whitman’s attempt to create a “Great construction of the New Bible” to save the nation on the eve of civil war and, for the first time, frames the book in historical rather than literary terms.
In his third edition, Whitman added 146 new poems to the 32 that comprised the second edition, reorganized the book into a bible of American civic religion that could be cited chapter and verse, and included erotic poetry intended to bind the nation in organic harmony. This 150th anniversary edition includes a facsimile reproduction of the original 1860 volume, a thought-provoking introduction by antebellum historian and Whitman scholar Jason Stacy that situates Whitman in nineteenth-century America, and annotations that provide detailed historical context for Whitman’s poems.
A profoundly rich product of a period when America faced its greatest peril, this third edition finds the poet transforming himself into a prophet of spiritual democracy and the Whitman we celebrate today—boisterous, barbaric, and benevolent. Reprinting it now continues the poet’s goal of proclaiming for “the whole of America for each / individual, without exception . . . uncompromising liberty and equality.”
In her first magical collection of poetry, Jennifer Elise Foerster weaves together a mythic and geographic exploration of a woman’s coming of age in a dislocated time. Leaving Tulsa, a book of road elegies and laments, travels from Oklahoma to the edges of the American continent through landscapes at once stark and lush, ancient and apocalyptic. The imagery that cycles through the poems—fire, shell, highway, wing—gives the collection a rich lyrical-dramatic texture. Each poem builds on a theme of searching for a lost “self”—an “other” America—that crosses biblical, tribal, and ecological mythologies.
In Leaving Tulsa, Foerster is not afraid of the strange or of estrangement. The narrator occupies a space in between and navigates the offbeat experiences of a speaker that is of both Muscogee and European heritage. With bold images and candid language, Foerster challenges the perceptions of what it means to be Native, what it means to be a woman, and what it means to be an American today. Ultimately, these brave and luminous poems engage and shatter the boundaries of time, self, and continent.
Foerster’s journey transcends both geographic space and the confines of the page to live vividly in the mind of the reader.
Despite St. Louis’s mid-twentieth-century reputation as a conservative and sleepy midwestern metropolis, the city and its surrounding region have long played host to dynamic forms of social-movement organizing. This was especially the case during the 1960s and 1970s, when a new generation of local activists lent their energies to the ongoing struggles for Black freedom, lesbian and gay liberation, feminist social transformations, environmental protection, an end to the Vietnam War, and more. This volume, the first of its kind, offers fifteen scholarly contributions that together bring into focus the exceptional range of progressive activist projects that took shape in a single midwestern city during these tumultuous decades.
In contrast to scholarship that seeks to interpret the era’s social-movement initiatives in a primarily national context, the works presented in this expansive collection emphasize the importance of locality, neighborhood, community institutions, and rooted social networks. Documenting wrenching forces of metropolitan change as well as grassroots resilience, Left in the Midwest shows us how place powerfully shaped agendas, worldviews, and opportunities for the disparate groups that dedicated themselves to progressive visions for their city. By revising our sense of the region’s past, this volume also expands our sense of the possibilities that the future may hold for activist movements seeking change in St. Louis and beyond.
Claudia Cumberbatch Jones was born in Trinidad. In 1924, she moved to New York, where she lived for the next thirty years. She was active in the Communist Party from her early twenties onward. A talented writer and speaker, she traveled throughout the United States lecturing and organizing. In the early 1950s, she wrote a well-known column, “Half the World,” for the Daily Worker. As the U.S. government intensified its efforts to prosecute communists, Jones was arrested several times. She served nearly a year in a U.S. prison before being deported and given asylum by Great Britain in 1955. There she founded The West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News and the Caribbean Carnival, an annual London festival that continues today as the Notting Hill Carnival. Boyce Davies examines Jones’s thought and journalism, her political and community organizing, and poetry that the activist wrote while she was imprisoned. Looking at the contents of the FBI file on Jones, Boyce Davies contrasts Jones’s own narration of her life with the federal government’s. Left of Karl Marx establishes Jones as a significant figure within Caribbean intellectual traditions, black U.S. feminism, and the history of communism.
Thoroughly grounded in the latest scholarly literature, theoretical sources, and experimental results, Legacy and Legitimacy substantially advances understanding of Black Americans’ attitudes toward the Supreme Court, the Court’s ability to influence Blacks’ opinions about the legitimacy of public institutions and policies, and the role of media in shaping Blacks’ judgments.
Drawing on legitimacy theory—which explains the acceptance of or tolerance for controversial policies—the authors begin by reexamining the significance of “diffuse support” in establishing legitimacy. They provide a useful overview of the literature on legitimacy and a concise history of the special relationship between Blacks and the Court. They investigate the influences of group attitudes and media “framing.” And they employ data from large-scale surveys to show that Blacks with greater levels of diffuse support for the Court are more likely to adopt positions consistent with Court rulings.
With its broad scope and inclusion of new experimental findings, Legacy and Legitimacy will interest students and scholars of judicial politics, racial politics, media and politics, black studies and public opinion.
Considered by many to be the greatest writer of his generation, David Foster Wallace was at the height of his creative powers when he committed suicide in 2008. In a sweeping portrait of Wallace’s writing and thought and as a measure of his importance in literary history, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace gathers cutting-edge, field-defining scholarship by critics alongside remembrances by many of his writer friends, who include some of the world’s most influential authors.
Capturing the lively modernist milieu of Kenneth Burke’s early career in Greenwich Village, where Burke arrived in 1915 fresh from high school in Pittsburgh, this book discovers him as an intellectual apprentice conversing with “the moderns.” Burke found himself in the midst of an avant-garde peopled by Malcolm Cowley, Marianne Moore, Jean Toomer, Katherine Anne Porter, William Carlos Williams, Allen Tate, Hart Crane, Alfred Stieglitz, and a host of other fascinating figures.
Burke himself, who died in 1993 at the age of 96, has been hailed as America’s most brilliant and suggestive critic and the most significant theorist of rhetoric since Cicero. Many schools of thought have claimed him as their own, but Burke has defied classification and indeed has often been considered a solitary, eccentric genius immune to intellectual fashions. But Burke’s formative work of the 1920s, when he first defined himself and his work in the context of the modernist conversation, has gone relatively unexamined.
Here we see Burke living and working with the crowd of poets, painters, and dramatists affiliated with Others magazine, Stieglitz’s “291” gallery, and Eugene O’Neill’s Provincetown Players; the leftists associated with the magazines The Masses and Seven Arts; the Dadaists; and the modernist writers working on literary journals like The Dial, where Burke in his capacity as an associate editor saw T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” into print for the first time and provided other editorial services for Thomas Mann, e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound, and many other writers of note. Burke also met the iconoclasts of the older generation represented by Theodore Dreiser and H. L. Mencken, the New Humanists, and the literary nationalists who founded Contact and The New Republic. Jack Selzer shows how Burke’s own early poems, fiction, and essays emerged from and contributed to the modernist conversation in Greenwich Village. He draws on a wonderfully rich array of letters between Burke and his modernist friends and on the memoirs of his associates to create a vibrant portrait of the young Burke’s transformation from aesthete to social critic.
In this tribute to Charlton Laird, ten scholars in the fields of language and linguistics provide ordinary readers with new insight into the workings of the English language. Laird, one of Nevada's treasured authors, was a professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Harvard’s searing and sobering indictment of its own long-standing relationship with chattel slavery and anti-Black discrimination.
In recent years, scholars have documented extensive relationships between American higher education and slavery. The Legacy of Slavery at Harvard adds Harvard University to the long list of institutions, in the North and the South, entangled with slavery and its aftermath.
The report, written by leading researchers from across the university, reveals hard truths about Harvard’s deep ties to Black and Indigenous bondage, scientific racism, segregation, and other forms of oppression. Between the university’s founding in 1636 and 1783, when slavery officially ended in Massachusetts, Harvard leaders, faculty, and staff enslaved at least seventy people, some of whom worked on campus, where they cared for students, faculty, and university presidents. Harvard also benefited financially and reputationally from donations by slaveholders, slave traders, and others whose fortunes depended on human chattel. Later, Harvard professors and the graduates they trained were leaders in so-called race science and eugenics, which promoted disinvestment in Black lives through forced sterilization, residential segregation, and segregation and discrimination in education.
No institution of Harvard’s scale and longevity is a monolith. Harvard was also home to abolitionists and pioneering Black thinkers and activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Hamilton Houston, and Eva Beatrice Dykes. In the late twentieth century, the university became a champion of racial diversity in education. Yet the past cannot help casting a long shadow on the present. Harvard’s motto, Veritas, inscribed on gates, doorways, and sculptures all over campus, is an exhortation to pursue truth. The Legacy of Slavery at Harvard advances that necessary quest.
From the quiet backstage, to the shimmering energies of the runway. to the electricity of the crowd, Gaskin's photographs take us to the ball. Legendary, comprised of photos taken at events in the New York city area, Philadelphia, Richmond, and Washington, D.C., is a collaboration between Gaskin, a camera-laden outsider who has been attending balls for twenty years, and the house members who let him enter the intimate world of ball culture. In addition to an introduction by Deborah Willis, Legendary includes an essay, "The Queer Undercommons," by Frank Roberts.
The twenty-five years after the Second World War were a lively and fertile period for the American novel and an era of momentous transformation in American society. Taking his title from the Kafka parable about the leopards who kept racing into the courtyard of the temple, disrupting the sacrifice, until they were made part of the ritual, Morris Dickstein shows how a daring band of outsiders reshaped the American novel and went on to dominate American fiction for the rest of the century.
In fluid prose, offering a social as well as a literary history, Dickstein provides a wide-ranging and frank reassessment of more than twenty key figures—including Jewish writers like Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth; African-Americans such as Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin; colorful emigrés like Vladimir Nabokov; and avatars of a new youth culture, including J. D. Salinger and Jack Kerouac.
Disputing the received wisdom about the culture of the Cold War, Dickstein shows why artists turned inward after the war and demonstrates how the writing of the 1960s emerged from the cultural ferment of the preceding decades, including road novels, avant-garde painting, bebop, film, psychoanalysis, and social changes that continue to affect us today.
Let Me Live tells the remarkable story of Angelo Herndon, a coal miner who worked as a labor organizer in Alabama and Georgia in the 1930s. Herndon led a racially integrated march of the unemployed in 1932 and was subsequently arrested when Communist Party literature was found in his bedroom. His trial made only small headlines at first, but eventually an international campaign to free him emerged, thanks to the efforts of the Communist Party and of labor unions interested in protecting the right to organize in the South. Herndon was finally set free by the U.S. Supreme Court, with the help of well-known leaders including C. Vann Woodward, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, and Whitney North Seymour, Sr.
Written while Herndon was in prison, Let Me Live tells the story behind his arrest and his struggle through the courts. It also describes his early life as a young boy in poverty, as a laborer in the Kentucky mines, and as a construction gang worker and traces the birth and development of his passion for the Communist Party. Originally published in 1937, this is the first new edition of Let Me Live since 1969, when Howard N. Meyer rescued it from obscurity. The book features texts from the Georgia and U.S. Supreme Court decisions, the text of Herndon’s speech, and newspaper editorials from the era. A substantive and thought-provoking introduction by Marlon B. Ross of the University of Virginia sheds light on this unique story and its importance to our understanding of the intersection of race and class in America—past and present.
“A book which every thoughtful American may do well to read. It is moving and challenging as the story of one man’s life and the question of one man’s fate.”
—New York Times
Letters from an American Farmer was published in London in 1782, just as the idea of an “American” was becoming a reality. Those epistolary essays introduced the European public to America’s landscape and customs and have since served as the iconic description of a then-new people. Dennis D. Moore’s convenient, up-to-date reader’s edition situates those twelve pieces from the 1782 Letters in the context of thirteen other essays representative of Crèvecoeur’s writings in English.
The “American Farmer” of the title is Crèvecoeur’s fictional persona Farmer James, a bumpkin from rural Pennsylvania. In his Introduction to this edition, Moore places this self-effacing pose in perspective and charts Crèvecoeur’s enterprising approach to self-promotion, which involved repackaging and adapting his writings for French and English audiences.
Born in Normandy, Crèvecoeur came to New York in the 1750s by way of England and then Canada, traveled throughout the colonies as a surveyor and trader, and was naturalized in 1765. The pieces he included in the 1782 Letters map a shift from hopefulness to disillusionment: its opening selections offer America as a utopian haven from European restrictions on personal liberty and material advancement but give way to portrayals of a land plagued by the horrors of slavery, the threat of Indian raids, and revolutionary unrest. This new edition opens up a broader perspective on this artful, ambitious writer and cosmopolitan thinker who coined America’s most enduring metaphor: a place where “individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.”
Through epistolary essays and poems, American Book Award- and Colorado Book Award-winning author and poet Aaron A. Abeyta captures the soul of the cultural and geographical crossroads of the driest quadrant in the nation, the Colorado headwaters, source to all the rivers in the southwestern and mid-western United States. Originating from and expanding on the themes of twenty-five years of “Headwaters” conferences at Western State Colorado University, these essays and poems embrace the region’s past while also exploring the struggles of a present that seeks a sustainable future for the borderlands that define the very cross-cultural essence of the American experience.
Approximately 100 letters are published here for the first time, including almost all of the letters to Jane Humphrey and to Mrs. J. Howard Sweetser. The new material is even more extensive than it might appear, for many of the letters previously published were censored when first made public. This volume, designed to accompany Mr. Johnson’s previously published work, the widely acclaimed Poems of Emily Dickinson, assembles all of Emily Dickinson’s letters (with the exception of letters presumably destroyed). The editors present the letters chronologically, with manuscript location, previous publication data, and notes for each letter, together with a general introduction, and biographical notes on recipients of letters.
The notes for each letter identify persons and events mentioned, and the source of literary allusions and quotations is given wherever known. Since Emily Dickinson rarely dated her letters after 1850, the dates for the most part must be conjectured from careful study of handwriting changes and from internal evidence of the letters. Of the 1,150 letters and prose fragments included in this outstanding edition, the text of about 800 derives from Dickinson autographs.
Here at last is the first volume of the long-awaited edition of Henry James letters by the world’s foremost Jamesian scholar, Leon Edel.
James was a superlative letter-writer; his correspondence constitutes one of the greatest self-portraits in all literature. In this edition Edel, respecting James’s view that only the best of a writer’s letters deserve publication, skims the cream of the fifteen thousand letters collected or discovered, many by the biographer himself, since the novelist’s death in 1916. In Volume I, the first of four, he provides a General Introduction and a necessary minimum of annotation, and prefaces each section—Boyhood and Youth; Beginnings; The Grand Tour; A Season in Cambridge; Travel and Opportunity; and The Choice—with an informative account of James’s attitudes and activities during the period in question. The volume closes, appropriately, with James’s decision in 1875, at age thirty-two, to move permanently to Europe.
The third volume of Leon Edel’s superb edition of Henry James’s letters finds the novelist settled in Europe and his expatriation complete. The letters of this time reflect the growth of James’s literary and personal friendships and introduce the reader to the frescoed palazzos, Palladian villas, and great estates of the Roseberys, the Rothschilds, the Bostonian-Venetian Curtises, and the Florentine-American Boott circle. In all his travels, James closely observes the social scene and the dilemmas of the human beings within it. During this fruitful period he writes The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, The Tragic Muse, and some thirty-five of his finest international tales.
Undermining his success, however, are a devastating series of disappointments. Financial insecurity, an almost paraniod defensiveness following the utter failure of his dramatic efforts, and the deaths of his sister, his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, and his ardent admirer Constance Fenimore Woolson all combine to take him to what he recognizes is the edge of an abyss of personal tragedy.
And yet James endures, and throughtout these trials his letters reveal the flourish, the tongue-in-cheek humor, and the social insight that marked his genius. As Edel writes in his Introduction: “The grand style is there, the amusement at the vanities of this world, the insistence that the great ones of the earth lack the imagination he is called upon to supply, and then his boundless affection and empathy for those who have shown him warmth and feeling.”
In an appendix Mr. Edel presents four remarkable unpublished letters from Miss Woolson to James. These throw light on their ambiguous relationship and on James’s feelings of guilt and shock after her suicide in Venice.
In this, the second volume of Leon Edel's superb edition of the letters, we see Henry James in his thirties, pursuing his writing in Paris and London and finding his first literary successes in Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady. The letters of these years, describing for family and friends in Boston the expatriate's days, reveal the usual wit and sophistication, but there is a new tone: James is relentlessly building a personal career and begins to see himself as a professional writer. Few other letters so fully document the process of an artist in the making.
James was a social success in London: in Mr. Edel's words, "England speedily opened its arms to him, as it does to anyone who is at ease with the world." The letters of this period pull us into the atmosphere of Victorian England, its drawing rooms, manors, and clubs, and James's keen American eyes give us views of this world probably unique in our literary annals. He used these observations to forge his great international theme, the confrontation of the Old and New Worlds.
Volumes III and IV of this edition bring together all the extant letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow for the period 1844-1865, most of which have never before been published. These letters carry Longfellow through the remarkable period when he was gaining renown both at home and abroad as the poet laureate of America. His influence swelled with the publication of such works as Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha, The Courtship of Miles Standish, and Part One of Tales of a Wayside Inn. During these twenty-two years his correspondence proliferated, reaching at least 4000 letters, of which 1500 are known to have survived and are reproduced in these two volumes.
The letters offer further insight not only into the poet's personal life but into his time as well. They document the manifold burdens placed on a popular man of letters, from responding to pleas for advice from unpublished poets to dealing with critical attacks on his own poetry to warding off the importunities of scores of admirers.
The letters further reveal a political interest not hitherto suspected in Longfellow. His exchanges with Senator Charles Sumner shed light on the political dramas of the day, including presidential elections, the Mexican War, the slavery controversy, the founding of the Republican party, and the Civil War. From a social viewpoint, the letters provide an absorbing account of the settled and elegant life of a member of the Boston-Cambridge upper class, into which Longfellow had moved with his marriage to Frances Appleton. They also reveal him as a warm-hearted family man, devoted to his wife and children and solicitous for the welfare of an unhappy brother, a widowed sister, and two wayward nephews.
The letters of Volume III span the publication of five volumes of verse, three anthologies, and a novel. They document the numerous private events that vied with literary production for Longfellow's attention, such as the birth of his six children and the complicated summer migrations to Nahant or Newport. They also follow Longfellow through his resignation from the liaryard professorship in 1854, which was prompted by a desire to devote himself more fully to writing.
Andrew Hilen, who is author of Longfellow and Scandinavia and Professor of English at the University of Washington, has included numerous contemporary photographs to illustrate the letters. His scrupulous annotations supply relevant identifications of individuals, explain allusions, and provide information regarding the addresses of letters, endorsements, postmarks, and the location of manuscripts.
These final volumes of Andrew Hilen's admired edition bring together the extant Longfellow letters of 1866–1882, most of which have never before been published. During this period Longfellow's reputation reached its zenith; no American poet before or since has enjoyed a popular following more varied or numerous. Here we see him expanding his already enormous influence with the publication of Poems of Places, a poetic translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, and other works. The letters reveal him as a hard-working writer and editor, as an astute businessman who nevertheless gave freely of his gains to friends and causes, and as an often lonely and struggling individual.
They provide, as well, a view of Longfellow's world—the American literary scene, the publishing business, academic life, politics, religion, and the Reconstruction period. Hilen includes in Volume VI a comprehensive index for the entire six-volume edition, which represents a social document of the times.
Volumes I and II of this projected multi-volume edition bring together for the first time all the extant letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow for the period 1814–1843. Most of the letters, which are of prime importance in America’s cultural history, have never before been published. The remainder that have appeared in print frequently did so in emasculated form and in a wide variety of books and journals. In addition to restoring the complete texts of this correspondence, editor Andrew Hilen has provided a distinguished General Introduction in Volume I and prefatory comments at the head of Parts I–IV of the two volumes. Scrupulous annotations supply relevant identifications of individuals, explain allusions, and present information regarding the addresses of letters, endorsements, postmarks, and the location of manuscripts.
Readers of the letters of this period will follow Longfellow through his career at Bowdoin College, both as an undergraduate and as a professor, on his lengthy sojourns in Europe, and through his first years as Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard. They offer a wealth of material that is available nowhere else on many of the leading issues of his day, on its literary and scholarly scene, and most important, on the development of the poet himself. Longfellow emerges from these pages as far more than the mild and studied figure that tradition has made of him.
The third installment of Harvard’s five-volume edition of Robert Frost’s correspondence.
The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 3: 1929–1936 is the latest installment in Harvard’s five-volume edition of the poet’s correspondence. It presents 601 letters, of which 425 are previously uncollected. The critically acclaimed first volume, a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, included nearly 300 previously uncollected letters, and the second volume 350 more.
During the period covered here, Robert Frost was close to the height of his powers. If Volume 2 covered the making of Frost as America’s poet, in Volume 3 he is definitively made. These were also, however, years of personal tribulation. The once-tight Frost family broke up as marriage, illness, and work scattered the children across the country. In the case of Frost’s son Carol, both distance and proximity put strains on an already fractious relationship. But the tragedy and emotional crux of this volume is the death of Frost’s youngest daughter, Marjorie. Frost’s correspondence from those dark days is a powerful testament to the difficulty of honoring the responsibilities of a poet’s eminence while coping with the intensity of a parent’s grief.
Volume 3 also sees Frost responding to the crisis of the Great Depression, the onset of the New Deal, and the emergence of totalitarian regimes in Europe, with wit, canny political intelligence, and no little acerbity. All the while, his star continues to rise: he wins a Pulitzer for Collected Poems in 1931 and will win a second for A Further Range, published in 1936, and he is in constant demand as a public speaker at colleges, writers’ workshops, symposia, and dinners. Frost was not just a poet but a poet-teacher; as such, he was instrumental in defining the public functions of poetry in the twentieth century. In the 1930s, Frost lived a life of paradox, as personal tragedy and the tumults of politics interwove with his unprecedented achievements.
Thoroughly annotated and accompanied by a biographical glossary and detailed chronology, these letters illuminate a triumphant and difficult period in the life of a towering literary figure.
Theodore Dreiser led a long and controversial life, almost always pursuing some serious question, and not rarely pursuing women. This collection, the second volume of Dreiser correspondence to be published by the University of Illinois Press, gathers previously unpublished letters Dreiser wrote to women between 1893 and 1945, many of them showing personal feelings Dreiser revealed nowhere else. Here he both preens and mocks himself, natters and scolds, relates his jaunts with Mencken and his skirmishes with editors and publishers. He admits his worries, bemoans his longings, and self-consciously embarks on love letters that are unafraid to smolder and flame. To one reader he sends “Kisses, Kisses, Kisses, for your sweety mouth” and urges his needy requests: “Write me a love-letter Honey girl.” Alongside such amorous play, he often expressed his deepest feelings on philosophical, religious, and social issues that characterize his public writing.
Chronologically arranged and meticulously edited by Thomas P. Riggio, these letters reveal how wide and deep Dreiser’s needs were. Dreiser often discussed his writing in his letters to women friends, telling them what he wanted to do, where he thought he succeeded and failed, and seeking approval or criticism. By turns seductive, candid, coy, and informative, these letters provide an intimate view of a master writer who knew exactly what he was after.
As Americans, we believe there ought to be a level playing field for everyone. Even if we don’t expect to finish first, we do expect a fair start. Only in sports have African Americans actually found that elusive level ground. But at the same time, black players offer an ironic perspective on the athlete-hero, for they represent a group historically held to be without social honor.
In his first new collection of sports essays since Tuxedo Junction (1989), the noted cultural critic Gerald Early investigates these contradictions as they play out in the sports world and in our deeper attitudes toward the athletes we glorify. Early addresses a half-century of heated cultural issues ranging from integration to the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Writing about Jackie Robinson and Curt Flood, he reconstructs pivotal moments in their lives and explains how the culture, politics, and economics of sport turned with them. Taking on the subtexts, racial and otherwise, of the controversy over remarks Rush Limbaugh made about quarterback Donovan McNabb, Early restores the political consequence to an event most commentators at the time approached with predictable bluster.
The essays in this book circle around two perennial questions: What other, invisible contests unfold when we watch a sporting event? What desires and anxieties are encoded in our worship of (or disdain for) high-performance athletes?
These essays are based on the Alain Locke lectures at Harvard University’s Du Bois Institute.
The histories and character of the party branches vary as widely as their locations. The Cape Verdeans of New Bedford, Massachusetts, were initially viewed as a particular challenge for the local Panthers but later became the mainstay of the Boston-area party. In the early 1970s, the Winston-Salem, North Carolina, chapter excelled at implementing the national Black Panther Party’s strategic shift from revolutionary confrontation to mainstream electoral politics. In Detroit, the Panthers were defined by a complex relationship between their above-ground activities and an underground wing dedicated to armed struggle. While the Milwaukee chapter was born out of a rising tide of black militancy, it ultimately proved more committed to promoting literacy and health care and redressing hunger than to violence. The Alabama Black Liberation Front did not have the official imprimatur of the national party, but it drew heavily on the Panthers’ ideas and organizing strategies, and its activism demonstrates the broad resonance of many of the concerns articulated by the national party: the need for jobs, for decent food and housing, for black self-determination, and for sustained opposition to police brutality against black people. Liberated Territory reveals how the Black Panther Party’s ideologies, goals, and strategies were taken up and adapted throughout the United States.
Contributors: Devin Fergus, Jama Lazerow, Ahmad A. Rahman, Robert W. Widell Jr., Yohuru Williams
The powerful novelist here turns penetrating critic, giving us—in lively style—both trenchant literary analysis and fresh insight on the art of writing.
“When African American writers began to trust the literary possibilities of their own verbal and musical creations,” writes Gayl Jones, they began to transform the European and European American models, and to gain greater artistic sovereignty.” The vitality of African American literature derives from its incorporation of traditional oral forms: folktales, riddles, idiom, jazz rhythms, spirituals, and blues. Jones traces the development of this literature as African American writers, celebrating their oral heritage, developed distinctive literary forms.
The twentieth century saw a new confidence and deliberateness in African American work: the move from surface use of dialect to articulation of a genuine black voice; the move from blacks portrayed for a white audience to characterization relieved of the need to justify. Innovative writing—such as Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s depiction of black folk culture, Langston Hughes’s poetic use of blues, and Amiri Baraka’s recreation of the short story as a jazz piece—redefined Western literary tradition.
For Jones, literary technique is never far removed from its social and political implications. She documents how literary form is inherently and intensely national, and shows how the European monopoly on acceptable forms for literary art stifled American writers both black and white. Jones is especially eloquent in describing the dilemma of the African American writers: to write from their roots yet retain a universal voice; to merge the power and fluidity of oral tradition with the structure needed for written presentation. With this work Gayl Jones has added a new dimension to African American literary history.
Gus Reed was a freed slave who traveled north as Sherman’s March was sweeping through Georgia in 1864. His journey ended in Springfield, Illinois, a city undergoing fundamental changes as its white citizens struggled to understand the political, legal, and cultural consequences of emancipation and black citizenship. Reed became known as a petty thief, appearing time and again in the records of the state’s courts and prisons. In late 1877, he burglarized the home of a well-known Springfield attorney—and brother of Abraham Lincoln’s former law partner—a crime for which he was convicted and sentenced to the Illinois State Penitentiary.
Reed died at the penitentiary in 1878, shackled to the door of his cell for days with a gag strapped in his mouth. An investigation established that two guards were responsible for the prisoner’s death, but neither they nor the prison warden suffered any penalty. The guards were dismissed, the investigation was closed, and Reed was forgotten.
Gus Reed’s story connects the political and legal cultures of white supremacy, black migration and black communities, the Midwest’s experience with the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the resurgence of nationwide opposition to African American civil rights in the late nineteenth century. These experiences shaped a nation with deep and unresolved misgivings about race, as well as distinctive and conflicting ideas about justice and how to achieve it.
Wegner shows how phenomena including the debate on globalization, neoliberal notions of the end of history, the explosive growth of the Internet, the efflorescence of new architectural and urban planning projects, developments in literary and cultural production, new turns in theory and philosophy, and the rapid growth of the antiglobalization movement came to characterize the long nineties. He offers readings of some of the most interesting cultural texts of the era: Don DeLillo’s White Noise; Joe Haldeman’s Forever trilogy; Octavia Butler’s Parable novels; the Terminator films; the movies Fight Club, Independence Day, Cape Fear, and Ghost Dog; and the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In so doing, he illuminates fundamental issues concerning narrative, such as how beginnings and endings are recognized and how relationships between events are constructed.
Somehow people continue to imagine a world of justice against the odds of a deck that has been stacked against them. In her urgent and perceptive book, Life in and against the Odds, Hoechst focuses on the particular circumstances and conditions of different phases of speculative expansion in the United States. She traces the roots of the nation-state to nineteenth-century land markets and slave exchanges. Hoechst also chronicles how these racial foundations extend through corporate capitalism from the 1920s and ´30s to the present era of financialized capitalism and the recent housing bubble.
Life in and against the Odds identifies where and how speculative nationalism creates roadblocks to freedom. Hoechst retells the history of the United States with a perspective on how human lives are made, destroyed, reconfigured, and claimed under the systemic violence of a nation that is rooted in the racializing futurity of speculative capitalism.
A vital contribution to environmental humanities that explores artistic responses to the plastic age
Since at least the 1960s, plastics have been a defining feature of contemporary life. They are undeniably utopian—wondrously innovative, cheap, malleable, durable, and convenient. Yet our proliferating use of plastics has also triggered catastrophic environmental consequences. Plastics are piling up in landfills, floating in oceans, and contributing to climate change and cancer clusters. They are derived from petrochemicals and enmeshed with the global oil economy, and they permeate our consumer goods and their packaging, our clothing and buildings, our bodies and minds. Plastic reshapes our cultural and social imaginaries.
With impressive breadth and compelling urgency, the essays in Life in Plastic examine the arts and literature of the plastic age. Focusing mainly on post-1960s North America, the collection spans a wide variety of genres, including graphic novels, superhero comics, utopic and dystopic science fiction, poetry, and satirical prose, as well as vinyl records and visual arts. Essays by a remarkable lineup of cultural theorists interrogate how plastic—as material and concept—has affected human sensibilities and expression. The collection reveals the place of plastic in reshaping how we perceive, relate to, represent, and re-imagine bodies, senses, environment, scale, mortality, and collective well-being.
Ultimately, the contributors to Life in Plastic think through plastic with an eye to imagining our way out of plastic, moving toward a postplastic future.
Contributors: Crystal Bartolovich, Syracuse U; Maurizia Boscagli, U of California, Santa Barbara; Christopher Breu, Illinois State U; Loren Glass, U of Iowa; Sean Grattan, U of Kent; Nayoung Kim, Brandeis U; Jane Kuenz, U of Southern Maine; Paul Morrison, Brandeis U; W. Dana Phillips, Towson U in Maryland and Rhodes U in Grahamstown, South Africa; Margaret Ronda, UC-Davis; Lisa Swanstrom, U of Utah; Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, Pennsylvania State U; Phillip E. Wegner, U of Florida; Daniel Worden, Rochester Institute of Technology.
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