BiblioVault - Books about Historical Events

1650-1850

Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (Volume 27)

Kevin L. Cope

Bucknell University Press, 2022

Rigorously inventive and revelatory in its adventurousness, 1650–1850 opens a forum for the discussion, investigation, and analysis of the full range of long-eighteenth-century writing, thinking, and artistry. Combining fresh considerations of prominent authors and artists with searches for overlooked or offbeat elements of the Enlightenment legacy, 1650–1850 delivers a comprehensive but richly detailed rendering of the first days, the first principles, and the first efforts of modern culture. Its pages open to the works of all nations and language traditions, providing a truly global picture of a period that routinely shattered boundaries. Volume 27 of this long-running journal is no exception to this tradition of focused inclusivity. Readers will travel through a blockbuster special feature on the topic of worldmaking and other worlds—on the Enlightenment zest for the discovery, charting, imagining, and evaluating of new worlds, envisioned worlds, utopian worlds, and worlds of the future. Essays in this enthusiastically extraterritorial offering escort readers through the science-fictional worlds of Lady Cavendish, around European gardens, over the high seas, across the American frontiers, into forests and exotic ecosystems, and, in sum, into the unlimited expanses of the Enlightenment mind. Further enlivening the volume is a cavalcade of full-length book reviews evaluating the latest in eighteenth-century scholarship.

ISSN 1065-3112

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Abusing Religion

Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions

Megan Goodwin

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Sex abuse happens in all communities, but American minority religions often face disproportionate allegations of sexual abuse. Why, in a country that consistently fails to acknowledge—much less address—the sexual abuse of women and children, do American religious outsiders so often face allegations of sexual misconduct? Why does the American public presume to know “what’s really going on” in minority religious communities? Why are sex abuse allegations such an effective way to discredit people on America’s religious margins? What makes Americans so willing, so eager to identify religion as the cause of sex abuse? Abusing Religion argues that sex abuse in minority religious communities is an American problem, not (merely) a religious one.

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American War Stories

Brenda M. Boyle

Rutgers University Press, 2021

American War Stories asks readers to contemplate what traditionally constitutes a “war story” and how that constitution obscures the normalization of militarism in American culture. The book claims the traditionally narrow scope of “war story,” as by a combatant about his wartime experience, compartmentalizes war, casting armed violence as distinct from everyday American life. Broadening “war story” beyond the specific genres of war narratives such as “war films,” “war fiction,” or “war memoirs,” American War Stories exposes how ingrained militarism is in everyday American life, a condition that challenges the very democratic principles the United States is touted as exemplifying.

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Antigone's Ghosts

The Long Legacy of War and Genocide in Five Countries

Wolfgram, Mark A

Bucknell University Press, 2019

Sophocles' play Antigone is a starting point for understanding the perpetual problems of human societies, families, and individuals who are caught up in the terrible aftermath of mass violence. What is one to do after the killing has stopped? What can be done to prevent a round of new violence? The tragic and dramatic tension in the play is put in motion by setting an unyielding Antigone against King Creon. As we see through the investigation of how Germany, Japan, Spain, Yugoslavia and Turkey have dealt with their histories of mass violence and genocide in the 20th century, the forces represented by Antigone and Creon remain very much part of our world today. Through a comparison of the five countries, their political institutions, and cultural traditions, we begin to appreciate the different pathways that societies have taken when confronting their violent histories.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

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At Home with the Holocaust

Postmemory, Domestic Space, and Second-Generation Holocaust Narratives

Lucas F. W. Wilson

Rutgers University Press, 2025

At Home with the Holocaust examines the relationship between intergenerational trauma and domestic space, focusing on how Holocaust survivors’ homes became extensions of their traumatized psyches that their children “inhabited.” Analyzing second- and third-generation Holocaust literature—such as Art Spiegelman's Maus, Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated, Sonia Pilcer's The Holocaust Kid, and Elizabeth Rosner's The Speed of Light—as well as oral histories of children of survivors, Lucas F. W. Wilson's study reveals how the material conditions of survivor-family homes, along with household practices and belongings, rendered these homes as spaces of traumatic transference. As survivors’ traumas became imbued in the very space of the domestic, their homes functioned as material archives of their Holocaust pasts, creating environments that, not uncommonly, second-handedly wounded their children. As survivor-family homes were imaginatively transformed by survivors’ children into the sites of their parents’ traumas, like concentration camps and ghettos, their homes catalyzed the transmission of these traumas.

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Being Human

Political Modernity and Hospitality in Kurdistan-Iraq

Fazil Moradi

Rutgers University Press, 2024

The Iraqi Baʿth state’s Anfāl operations (1987-1991) is one of the twentieth century’s ultimate acts of destruction of the possibility of being human. It remains the first and only crime of state in the Middle East to be tried under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, the 1950 Nuremberg Principles, and the 1969 Iraqi Penal Code and to be recognized as genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in Baghdad between 2006 and 2007. Being Human: Political Modernity and Hospitality in Kurdistan-Iraq offers an unprecedented pathway to the study of political violence. It is a sweeping work of anthropological hospitality, returning to the Anfāl operations as the violence of political modernity only to turn to the human survivors’ hospitality and acts of translation—testimonial narratives, law, politics, archive, poetry, artworks, museums, memorials, symbolic cemeteries, and infinite pursuit of justice in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Being Human gathers together social sciences, humanities, and the arts to understand modernity's violence and its living on.

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Boswell and the Press

Essays on the Ephemeral Writing of James Boswell

Donald J. Newman

Bucknell University Press, 2021

Boswell and the Press: Essays on the Ephemeral Writing of James Boswell is the first sustained examination of James Boswell’s ephemeral writing, his contributions to periodicals, his pamphlets, and his broadsides. The essays collected here enhance our comprehension of his interests, capabilities, and proclivities as an author and refine our understanding of how the print environment in which he worked influenced what he wrote and how he wrote it. This book will also be of interest to historians of journalism and the publishing industry of eighteenth-century Britain.

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By Words Alone

The Holocaust in Literature

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi

University of Chicago Press, 1980

The creative literature that evolved from the Holocaust constitutes an unprecedented encounter between art and life. Those who wrote about the Holocaust were forced to extend the limits of their imaginations to encompass unspeakably violent extremes of human behavior. The result, as Ezrahi shows in By Words Alone, is a body of literature that transcends national and cultural boundaries and shares a spectrum of attitudes toward the concentration camps and the world beyond, toward the past and the future.

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Civil War Nurse Narratives, 1863-1870

Daneen Wardrop

University of Iowa Press, 2015

Civil War Nurse Narratives, 1863–1870, examines the first wave of autobiographical narratives written by northern female nurses and published during the war and shortly thereafter, ranging from the well-known Louisa May Alcott to lesser-known figures such as Elvira Powers and Julia Wheelock. From the hospitals of Washington, DC, and Philadelphia, to the field at Gettysburg in the aftermath of the battle, to the camps bordering front lines during active combat, these nurse narrators reported on what they saw and experienced for an American audience hungry for tales of individual experience in the war.

As a subgenre of war literature, the Civil War nurse narrative offered realistic reportage of medical experiences and declined to engage with military strategies or Congressional politics. Instead, nurse narrators chronicled the details of attending wounded soldiers in the hospital, where a kind of microcosm of US democracy-in-progress emerged. As the war reshaped the social and political ideologies of the republic, nurses labored in a workplace that reflected cultural changes in ideas about gender, race, and class. Through interactions with surgeons and other officials they tested women’s rights convictions, and through interactions with formerly enslaved workers they wrestled with the need to live up to their own often abolitionist convictions and support social equality.

By putting these accounts in conversation with each other, Civil War Nurse Narratives productively explores a developing genre of war literature that has rarely been given its due and that offers refreshing insights into women’s contributions to the war effort. Taken together, these stories offer an impressive and important addition to the literary history of the Civil War.

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Civilizing War

Imperial Politics and the Poetics of National Rupture

Nasser Mufti

Northwestern University Press, 2018

Winner of the Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities, awarded by the Council of Graduate Schools
Honorable Mention for the 2019 Sonya Rudikoff Prize, awarded by the Northeast Victorian Studies Association

Civilizing War traces the historical transformation of civil war from a civil affair into an uncivil crisis. Civil war is today synonymous with the global refugee crisis, often serving as grounds for liberal-humanitarian intervention and nationalist protectionism.

In Civilizing War, Nasser Mufti situates this contemporary conjuncture in the long history of British imperialism, demonstrating how civil war has been and continues to be integral to the politics of empire. Through comparative readings of literature, criticism, historiography, and social analysis, Civilizing War shows how writers and intellectuals of Britain’s Anglophone empire articulated a “poetics of national rupture” that defined the metropolitan nation and its colonial others.

Mufti’s tour de force marshals a wealth of examples as diverse as Thomas Carlyle, Benjamin Disraeli, Friedrich Engels, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, V. S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, and Michael Ondaatje to examine the variety of forms this poetics takes—metaphors, figures, tropes, puns, and plot—all of which have played a central role in Britain’s civilizing mission and its afterlife. In doing so, Civilizing War shifts the terms of Edward Said’s influential Orientalism to suggest that imperialism was not only organized around the norms of civility but also around narratives of civil war.

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The Collapse of Heaven

The Taiping Civil War and Chinese Literature and Culture, 1850–1880

Huan Jin

Harvard University Press, 2024

The Collapse of Heaven investigates a long-neglected century in Chinese literature through the lens of the Taiping War (1851–1864), one of the most devastating civil wars in human history. With the war as the pivot, Huan Jin examines the manifold literary and cultural transformations that occurred from the 1850s to the 1880s. The book analyzes a wide range of writings—proselytizing pamphlets, diaries, poetry, a full-length novel, drama, and short stories—with a particular emphasis on the materiality of these texts as well as their production and dissemination. Tracing allusions to political turbulences across many genres, Jin discusses how late imperial Chinese literary and cultural paradigms began to unravel under conditions of extreme violence and tracks the unexpected reinventions of literary conventions that marked the beginning of Chinese literary modernity. In addition to making a significant contribution to Chinese studies, this book offers an important comparative perspective on the global nineteenth century and engages with broad scholarly discussions on religion, violence, narrative, history, gender, theater, and media studies.

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Dealing with Disasters from Early Modern to Modern Times

Cultural Responses to Catastrophes

Hanneke van Asperen

Amsterdam University Press, 2023

Disasters are as much cultural as natural phenomena. For centuries, news about catastrophic events has been disseminated through media such as chronicles, pamphlets, newspapers, poems, drawings, and prints. Nowadays, we are overwhelmed with news about the cataclysmic effects of recent forest fires, floods, and storms. Due to the ongoing climate crisis, extreme weather events will likely have ever greater impacts on our lives.
This volume addresses cultural representations of catastrophes such as floods, epidemics, and earthquakes over the centuries. In the past as now, artists and authors try to make sense of disasters, grasp their impact, and communicate moral, religious, or political messages. These creations reflect and shape how people learn and think about disasters that occur nearby or far away, both in time and space. The parallels between past and present underline how this book contributes to modern debates about cultural and creative strategies in response to disasters.

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Emily Dickinson's Shakespeare

Paraic Finnerty

University of Massachusetts Press, 2008

One of the messages that Emily Dickinson wanted to communicate to the world was her great love of William Shakespeare—her letters abound with references to him and his works. This book explores the many implications of her admiration for the Bard.

Páraic Finnerty clarifies the essential role that Shakespeare had in Dickinson's life by locating her allusions to his writings within a nineteenth-century American context and by treating reading as a practice that is shaped, to a large extent, by culture. In the process, he throws new light on Shakespeare's multifaceted presence in Dickinson's world: in education, theater, newspapers, public lectures, reading clubs, and literary periodicals.

Through analysis of letters, journals, diaries, records, periodicals, newspapers, and marginalia, Finnerty juxtaposes Dickinson's engagement with Shakespeare with the responses of her contemporaries. Her Shakespeare emerges as an immoral dramatist and highly moral poet; a highbrow symbol of class and cultivation and a lowbrow popular entertainer; an impetus behind the emerging American theater criticism and an English author threatening American creativity; a writer culturally approved for women and yet one whose authority women often appropriated to critique their culture. Such a context allows the explication of Dickinson's specific references to Shakespeare and further conjecture about how she most likely read him.

Finnerty also examines those of Dickinson's responses to Shakespeare that deviated from what might have been expected and approved of by her culture. Imaginatively departing from the commonplace, Dickinson chose to admire three of Shakespeare's most powerful and transgressive female characters—Cleopatra, Queen Margaret, and Lady Macbeth—instead of his more worthy and virtuous heroines. More startling, although the poet found resonance for her own life in Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth, she chose, in the racially charged atmosphere of nineteenth-century America, to identify with Shakespeare's most controversial character, Othello, thereby defying expectations once again.

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Enduring Postwar

Yasuoka Shotaro and Literary Memory in Japan

Kendall Heitzman

Vanderbilt University Press

Yasuoka Shotaro (1920–2013) was perfectly situated to become Japan's premier chronicler of the Showa period (1926–89). Over fifty years as a writer, Yasuoka produced stories, novels, plays, and essays, as well as monumental histories that connected his own life to those of his ancestors. He was also the only major Japanese writer to live in the American South during the Civil Rights Movement, when he spent most of an academic year at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. In 1977, he translated Alex Haley's Roots into Japanese.

For a long period, Yasuoka was at the center of the Japanese literary establishment, serving on prize committees and winning the major literary prizes of the era: the Akutagawa, the Noma, the Yomiuri, and the Kawabata. But what makes Yasuoka fascinating as a writer is the way that he consciously, deliberately resisted accepted narratives of modern Japanese history through his approach to personal and collective memory.

In Enduring Postwar, the first literary and biographical study of Yasuoka in English, Kendall Heitzman explores the element of memory in Yasuoka's work in the context of his life and evolving understanding of postwar Japan.

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Enemies of All Humankind

Fictions of Legitimate Violence

Sonja Schillings

Dartmouth College Press, 2016

Hostis humani generis, meaning “enemy of humankind,” is the legal basis by which Western societies have defined such criminals as pirates, torturers, or terrorists as beyond the pale of civilization. Sonja Schillings argues that the legal fiction designating certain persons or classes of persons as enemies of all humankind does more than characterize them as inherently hostile: it supplies a narrative basis for legitimating violence in the name of the state. The book draws attention to a century-old narrative pattern that not only underlies the legal category of enemies of the people, but more generally informs interpretations of imperial expansion, protest against structural oppression, and the transformation of institutions as “legitimate” interventions on behalf of civilized society. Schillings traces the Anglo-American interpretive history of the concept, which she sees as crucial to understanding US history, in particular with regard to the frontier, race relations, and the war on terror.

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Extremities

Trauma, Testimony, and Community

Edited by Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw

University of Illinois Press, 2002

How do we come to terms with what can't be forgotten?

How do we bear witness to extreme experiences that challenge the limits of language? This remarkable volume explores the emotional, political, and aesthetic dimensions of testimonies to trauma as they translate private anguish into public space. Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw have assembled a collection of essays that trace the legacy of the Holocaust and subsequent events that have shaped twentieth-century history and still haunt contemporary culture.

Extremities combines personal and scholarly approaches to a wide range of texts that bear witness to shocking and moving accounts of individual trauma: Toni Morrison's Beloved, Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus," Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, Tatana Kellner's Holocaust art, Ruth Klüger's powerful memoir Still Alive, and Binjamin Wilkomirski's controversial narrative of concentration camp suffering Fragments. The book grapples with the cultural and social effects of historical crises, including the Montreal Massacre, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the medical catastrophes of HIV/AIDS and breast cancer.

Developing insights from autobiography, psychoanalysis, feminist theory and gender studies, the authors demonstrate that testimonies of troubling and taboo subjects do more than just add to the culture of confession–-they transform identities and help reimagine the boundaries of community. Extremities offers an original and timely interpretive guide to the growing field of trauma studies. The volume includes essays by Ross Chambers, Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Marianne Hirsch, Wayne Koestenbaum, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and others.

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Freedom’s Ring

Literatures of Liberation from Civil Rights to the Second Wave

Jacqueline Foertsch

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Freedom’s Ring begins with the question of how the American ideal of freedom, which so effectively defends a conservative agenda today, from globally exploitative free trade to anti-French “freedom fries” during the War in Iraq, once bolstered the progressive causes of Freedom Summer, the Free Speech Movement, and more militant Black Power and Women’s Liberation movements with equal efficacy. Focused as it is on the faring of freedom throughout the liberation era, this book also explores attempts made by rights movements to achieve the often competitive or cross-canceling American ideal of equality–economic, professional, and otherwise. Although many struggled and died for it in the civil rights era, freedoms such as the vote, integrated bus rides, and sex without consequences via the Pill, are ultimately free–costing officialdom little if anything to fully implement—while equality with respect to jobs, salaries, education, housing, and health care, will forever be the much more expensive nut to crack. Freedom’s Ring regards the politics of freedom, and politics in general, as a low-cost substitute for and engrossing distraction from substantive economic problem-solving from the liberation era to the present day.

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The Global Frontier

Postwar Travel in American Literature

Eric Strand

University of Iowa Press, 2023

Americans often associate travel with luxury, a cosmopolitan lifestyle, and relaxation. They travel to “get away from it all.” Most fail to consider that modern American travel began in the straitened circumstances of the 1930s, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt encouraged citizens to tour the United States so as to stimulate the economy. The Federal Writers’ Project composed guidebooks for each state, and tourism became a form of national solidarity.

After World War II, the Western frontier of self-reinvention and spatial expansion opened up through the explosion of the global travel industry. The Global Frontier shows that a variety of postwar literary travelers sought personal freedom and cultural enrichment outside their nation’s borders, including Black, female, and queer writers. But the price of incorporation into a transnational leisure class was complicity in postwar American imperialism and the rejection of 1930s social commitments. Eric Strand argues that capitalist globalization has enabled creative expression for marginalized identities, and that present-day humanists are the descendants of writers such as William S. Burroughs, Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, and Elizabeth Bishop. Yet this personal liberation has accompanied a vast growth of social inequality, which can only be addressed by reorienting toward progressive nationalism and an activist state.

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The Historical Writing of the Mongol Invasions in Japan

Judith Vitale

Harvard University Press, 2024

The myth that kamikaze, or divine winds, protected Japan against the Mongol invasions of 1274 and 1281 is linked to a belief in absolute victory in the Pacific War in the twentieth century. But what was the representation of a historical past in Japan, and what role did it play as a repertoire of cultural identity before the rise of hyper-nationalism?

The Historical Writing of the Mongol Invasions in Japan is about the names for Japan and the Mongols, the commemoration of battle sites and ancestors, and the antiquarian exchanges within confined circles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the Tokugawa culture of appearances, historical writing and related genres affirmed status identity. In the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, the exploits of thirteenth-century warriors served as a model for propagating revolutionary change in Japanese cities, whereas in the 1880s and 1890s, conservative associations appropriated the defense against the Mongol invasions as a symbol of patriotism. The Historical Writing of the Mongol Invasions in Japan thus points to the continuities and ruptures that marked the emergence of a national culture after the Meiji Restoration of 1868.

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Holocaust Graphic Narratives

Generation, Trauma, and Memory

Victoria Aarons

Rutgers University Press, 2020

In Holocaust Graphic Narratives, Victoria Aarons demonstrates the range and fluidity of this richly figured genre. Employing memory as her controlling trope, Aarons analyzes the work of the graphic novelists and illustrators, making clear how they extend the traumatic narrative of the Holocaust into the present and, in doing so, give voice to survival in the wake of unrecoverable loss. In recreating moments of traumatic rupture, dislocation, and disequilibrium, these graphic narratives contribute to the evolving field of Holocaust representation and establish a new canon of visual memory. The intergenerational dialogue established by Aarons’ reading of these narratives speaks to the on-going obligation to bear witness to the Holocaust. Examined together, these intergenerational works bridge the erosions created by time and distance. As a genre of witnessing, these graphic stories, in retracing the traumatic tracks of memory, inscribe the weight of history on generations that follow.

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Holocaust Literature

A History and Guide

David G. Roskies and Naomi Diamant

Brandeis University Press, 2013

What is Holocaust literature? When does it begin and how is it changing? Is there an essential core that consists of diaries, eyewitness accounts of the concentration camps, and tales of individual survival? Is it the same everywhere: West and East, in Australia as in the Americas, in poetry as in prose? Is this literature sacred and separate, or can it be studied alongside other responses to catastrophe? What works of Holocaust literature will be read a hundred years from now—and why? Here, for the first time, is a historical survey of Holocaust literature in all genres, countries, and major languages. Beginning in wartime, it proceeds from the literature of mobilization and mourning in the Free World to the vast literature produced in Nazi-occupied ghettos, bunkers and places of hiding, transit and concentration camps. No less remarkable is the new memorial literature that begins to take shape within weeks and months of the liberation. Moving from Europe to Israel, the United States, and beyond, the authors situate the writings by real and proxy witnesses within three distinct postwar periods: “communal memory,” still internal and internecine; “provisional memory” in the 1960s and 1970s, when a self-conscious Holocaust genre is born; and “authorized memory,” in which we live today. Twenty book covers—first editions in their original languages—and a guide to the “first hundred books” show the multilingual scope, historical depth, and artistic range of this extraordinary body of writing.

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The Holocaust

Theoretical Readings

Levi, Neil

Rutgers University Press, 2003

The first anthology to address the relationship between the events of the Nazi genocide and the intellectual concerns of contemporary literary and cultural theory in one substantial and indispensable volume.

This agenda-setting reader brings together both classic and new writings to demonstrate how concerns arising from the Nazi genocide shaped contemporary literary and cultural theory. Wide in its thematic scope, it covers such vital questions as:
- Authenticity and experience
- Memory and trauma
- Historiography and the philosophy of history
- Fascism and Nazi anti-Semitism
- Representation and identity formation
- Race, gender, and genocide
- Implications of the Holocaust for theories of the unconscious, ethics, politics, and aesthetics

The readings, which are fully contextualized by a general introduction, section introductions, and bibliographical notes, represent the work of many influential writers and theorists, including Theodor Adorno, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Jean Baudrillard, Zygmunt Bauman, Walter Benjamin, Cathy Caruth, Jacques Derrida, Shoshana Felman, Saul Friedlander, Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Langer, Emmanuel Levinas, Primo Levi, Jean-François Lyotard, Hayden White, and James E. Young. This multidisciplinary anthology will be welcomed by students and scholars of the Holocaust.

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Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey

A Legacy to the World

W. B. Gerard

Bucknell University Press, 2021

Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy continues to be as widely read and admired as upon its first appearance. Deemed more accessible than Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and often assigned as a college text, A Sentimental Journey has received its share of critical attention, but—unlike Tristram Shandy—to date it has not been the subject of a dedicated anthology of critical essays. This volume fills that gap with fresh perspectives on Sterne’s novel that will appeal to students and critics alike. Together with an introduction that situates each essay within A Sentimental Journey’s reception history, and a tailpiece detailing the culmination of Sterne’s career and his death, this volume presents a cohesive approach to this significant text that is simultaneously grounded and revelatory.

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Literature and Revolution

British Responses to the Paris Commune of 1871

Owen Holland

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Between March and May 1871, the Parisian Communards fought for a revolutionary alternative to the status quo grounded in a vision of internationalism, radical democracy and economic justice for the working masses that cut across national borders. The eventual defeat and bloody suppression of the Commune resonated far beyond Paris. In Britain, the Commune provoked widespread and fierce condemnation, while its defenders constituted a small, but vocal, minority. The Commune evoked long-standing fears about the continental ‘spectre’ of revolution, not least because the Communards’ seizure of power represented an embryonic alternative to the bourgeois social order.

This book examines how a heterogeneous group of authors in Britain responded to the Commune. In doing so, it provides the first full-length critical study of the reception and representation of the Commune in Britain during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, showing how discussions of the Commune functioned as a screen to project hope and fear, serving as a warning for some and an example to others. Writers considered in the book include John Ruskin, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Eliza Lynn Linton, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Margaret Oliphant, George Gissing, Henry James, William Morris, Alfred Austin and H.G. Wells. As the book shows, many, but not all, of these writers responded to the Commune with literary strategies that sought to stabilize bourgeois subjectivity in the wake of the traumatic shock of a revolutionary event. The book extends critical understanding of the Commune’s cultural afterlives and explores the relationship between literature and revolution.

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Making History Move

Five Principles of the Historical Film

Kim Nelson

Rutgers University Press, 2024

Making History Move: Five Principles of the Historical Film builds upon decades of scholarship investigating history in visual culture by proposing a methodology of five principles to analyze history in moving images in the digital age. It charts a path to understanding the form of history with the most significant impact on public perceptions of the past. The book develops insights across these fields, including philosophical considerations of film and history, to clarify the form and function of history in moving images. It addresses the implications of the historical film on public historical consciousness, presenting criteria to engage and assess the truth status of depictions of the past. Each chapter offers a detailed aspect of this methodology for analyzing history in moving images. Together, they propose five principles to organize past and future scholarship in this vital, interdisciplinary field of study.

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Media Laboratories

Late Modernist Authorship in South America

Sarah Ann Wells

Northwestern University Press, 2017

Winner, LASA Best Book Published in 2017, Southern Cone Section, Humanities category

Media Laboratories explores a pivotal time for South American literature of the 1930s and ’40s. Cinema, radio, and the typewriter, once seen as promising catalysts for new kinds of writing, began to be challenged by authors, workers, and the public. What happens when media no longer seem novel and potentially democratic but rather consolidated and dominant? Moving among authors from Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, and among the genres of fiction, the essay, popular journalism, and experimental little magazines, Sarah Ann Wells shows how writers on the periphery of global modernity were fashioning alternative approaches to these media. Analyzing authors such as Clarice Lispector, Jorge Luis Borges, and Felisberto Hernández, along with their lesser-known contemporaries, Media Laboratories casts a wide net: from spectators of Hollywood and Soviet montage films, to inventors of imaginary media, to proletarian typists who embodied the machine-human encounters of the period. The text navigates contemporary scholarly and popular debates about the relationship of literature to technological innovation, media archaeology, sound studies, populism, and global modernisms. Ultimately, Wells underscores a question that remains relevant: what possibilities emerge when the enthusiasm for new media has been replaced by anxiety over their potentially pernicious effects in a globalizing, yet vastly unequal, world?

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Minor Salvage

The Korean War and Korean American Life Writings

Stephen Hong Sohn

University of Michigan Press, 2022

The Korean War, often invoked in American culture as “the forgotten war,” remains ongoing. Though active fighting only occurred between 1950 and 1953, the signing of an armistice resulted in an infamous stalemate and the construction of the Korean Peninsula’s Demilitarized Zone. Minor Salvage reads early Korean American life writings in order to explore the admittedly partial ways in which those made precarious by war seek to rebuild their lives. The titular phrase “minor salvage,” draws on different valences of the word salvage which, while initially associated with naval recovery efforts, can also be used to describe the rescue of waste material. Spurred by the stories told and retold to him by his parents Soon Ho and Yunpyo, Sohn enacts minor salvage by reading overlooked early Korean American life writings penned by Induk Pahk, Taiwon Koh, Joseph Anthony, and Kim Yong-ik alongside a later generation of life writings authored by Sunny Che and K. Connie Kang. In the context of the Korean War, Sohn argues, life writings take on a crucial political orientation precisely because of the fragility attached to refugees, civilians, children, women, and divided family members. To depict the possibility of life is to acknowledge simultaneously the threat of death, violence, and brutality, and in this regard, such life writings are part of a longer genealogy in which marginalized communities find representational power through the creative process.

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Networks of Improvement

Literature, Bodies, and Machines in the Industrial Revolution

Jon Mee

University of Chicago Press, 2023

A new literary-cultural history of the Industrial Revolution in Britain from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries.

Working against the stubbornly persistent image of “dark satanic mills,” in many ways so characteristic of literary Romanticism, Jon Mee provides a fresh, revisionary account of the Industrial Revolution as a story of unintended consequences. In Networks of Improvement, Mee reads a wide range of texts—economic, medical, and more conventionally “literary”—with a focus on their circulation through networks and institutions. Mee shows how a project of enlightened liberal reform articulated in Britain’s emerging manufacturing towns led to unexpectedly coercive forms of machine productivity, a pattern that might be seen repeating in the digital technologies of our own time. Instead of treating the Industrial Revolution as Romanticism’s “other,” Mee shows how writing, practices, and institutions emanating from these industrial towns developed a new kind of knowledge economy, one where local literary and philosophical societies served as important transmission hubs for the circulation of knowledge.

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Notorious Facts

Publicity in Romantic England, 1780–1830

James Mulvihill

University of Delaware Press, 2012

Notorious Facts examines the sensationalistic confounding of persons and principles in the public life of Romantic England (1780–1830). Its purview is limited to five decades straddling the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but its trajectory, moving from a politics rendered in personal terms to a politics of personality, describes a shift still in process today. The study’s chapters draw on a motley body of literature (pamphlets, secret histories, and the like) that at first glance seems uncharacteristic of what literary historians call the English Romantic period. Viewed in the context of something called late Georgian England, these texts seem more indigenous, but if the canonical revisionism of the last few decades should teach us anything, it is that a Romanticism encompassing all romanticisms ideally excludes nothing.

In its heroic Enlightenment sense, publicity is concerned with exposing the workings of power for all to see. A good deal may be inferred about publicity in Romantic England from primary texts in which this salutary function is at once espoused and subverted. These texts—the mostly nameless or pseudonymous authors of the age’s pamphlet literature are the heroes and villains of the piece—almost invariably claim to speak from a disinterested conception of publicity while putting its methods of critical exposure to wholly self-interested purposes. This study examines well-known authors of the period like Jeremy Bentham, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Hazlitt, as well as pamphleteers like John Horne Tooke, Philip Withers, and Nathaniel Jefferys. Other figures include authors of secret history like Thomas Ashe, Mary Anne Clarke, Lewis Goldsmith, and Joseph Haslewood in addition to notorious figures in their own right such as the Prince and Princess of Wales, Mrs. Fitzherbert, and the Reverend Edward Irving. Among the topics treated are treasonous libel, royal scandal, secret history, and celebrity.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

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The Nutmeg's Curse

Parables for a Planet in Crisis

Amitav Ghosh

University of Chicago Press, 2021

In this ambitious successor to The Great Derangement, acclaimed writer Amitav Ghosh finds the origins of our contemporary climate crisis in Western colonialism’s violent exploitation of human life and the natural environment.

A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, Amitav Ghosh’s new book traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. The Nutmeg’s Curse argues that the dynamics of climate change today are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. At the center of Ghosh’s narrative is the now-ubiquitous spice nutmeg. The history of the nutmeg is one of conquest and exploitation—of both human life and the natural environment. In Ghosh’s hands, the story of the nutmeg becomes a parable for our environmental crisis, revealing the ways human history has always been entangled with earthly materials such as spices, tea, sugarcane, opium, and fossil fuels. Our crisis, he shows, is ultimately the result of a mechanistic view of the earth, where nature exists only as a resource for humans to use for our own ends, rather than a force of its own, full of agency and meaning.

Writing against the backdrop of the global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, Ghosh frames these historical stories in a way that connects our shared colonial histories with the deep inequality we see around us today. By interweaving discussions on everything from the global history of the oil trade to the migrant crisis and the animist spirituality of Indigenous communities around the world, The Nutmeg’s Curse offers a sharp critique of Western society and speaks to the profoundly remarkable ways in which human history is shaped by non-human forces.

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The Politics of Rape

Sexual Atrocity, Propaganda Wars, and the Restoration Stage

Jennifer L. Airey

University of Delaware Press, 2013

The Politics of Rape: Sexual Atrocity, Propaganda Wars, and the Restoration Stage is the first full-length study to examine representations of sexual violence on the Restoration stage. By reading theatrical depictions of sexual violence alongside political tracts, propaganda pamphlets, and circulating broadsides, this study argues that authors used dramatic representations of rape to respond to and engage with late-century upheavals in British political culture. Beginning with an examination of rape scenes in English Civil War propaganda, The Politics of Rape argues that Roundhead authors described acts of rape and atrocity to demonize their enemies, the Irish, the Catholics, and the Cavaliers. After the Restoration, propagandists and playwrights on each side of every political conflict would follow suit, altering the rhetoric of sexual violence in response to each new moment of political upheaval: The Restoration of Charles II, the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars, the Popish Plot, the Exclusion Crisis, the Glorious Revolution, and the accession of William and Mary. The study offers an intensive look at British propaganda culture, gathering together a wealth of understudied pamphlet texts, and identifying a series of stock figures that recur throughout the century: The demonic Irishman, sexually violent villain of the 1641 Irish Rebellion tracts; the debauched Cavalier, the secretly Catholic royalist rapist; the poisonous Catholic bride, the malignant consort who encourages the rapes of Protestant women; the cannibal father, the evil patriarch who rapes his daughters-in-laws before ingesting his own sons as a symbol of monarchical overreach; and the ravished monarch, the male rape victim whose sexual violation protests his political disenfranchisement. The study also traces the appearance of these figures on the British stage, examining well-known works by Dryden, Rochester, Behn, Lee, and Shadwell, alongside lesser-known plays by Orrery, Howard, Settle, Crowne, Ravenscroft, Pix, Cibber, and Brady. The Politics of Rape thus offers a new method for understanding of the geo-political implications of theatrical sexual violence.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

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Reading Etty Hillesum in Context

Writings, Life, and Influences of a Visionary Author

Edited by Klaas Smelik, Gerrit van Oord, and Jurjen Wiersma

Amsterdam University Press, 2018

The diaries and letters of Etty Hillesum (1914—1943) have a special place among the Jewish-Dutch testimonies of the Shoah, so much so that Etty Hillesum studies has become its own field. This book offers the most important contributions from the past fifteen years of international research into Hillesum’s work and life, studying her ethical, philosophical, spiritual, and literary existential search.

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Self as Nation

Contemporary Hebrew Autobiography

Tamar S. Hess

Brandeis University Press, 2016

Theorists of autobiography tend to emphasize the centrality of the individual against the community. By contrast, in her reading of Hebrew autobiography, Tamar Hess identifies the textual presence and function of the collective and its interplay with the Israeli self. What characterizes the ten writers she examines is the idea of a national self, an individual whose life story takes on meaning from his or her relation to the collective history and ethos of the nation. Her second and related argument is that this self—individually and collectively—must be understood in the context of waves of immigration to Israel’s shores. Hess convincingly shows that autobiography is a transnational genre deeply influenced by the nation’s literary as well as cultural history. This book makes an additional contribution to the history of autobiography and contemporary autobiography theory by analyzing the strategies of fragmentation that many of the writers Hess studies have adopted as ways of dealing with the conflicts between the self and the nation, between who they feel they are and what they are expected to be. Hess contrasts the predominantly masculine tradition of Hebrew autobiography with writings by women, and offers a fresh understanding of the Israeli soul and the Hebrew literary canon. A systematic review of contemporary Hebrew autobiography, this study raises fundamental questions essential to the debates about identity at the heart of Israeli culture today. It will interest scholars and students of contemporary Israeli culture, as well as those intrigued by the literary genre of autobiography.

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Sense and Spectacle in the Age of Philip IV

Performing Empire in Word, Music, and Image

Mary Quinn

Amsterdam University Press, 2024

This book accounts for the outpouring of celebrations in the Habsburg Empire upon the 1657 birth of Felipe Próspero, heir to Philip IV of Spain. These celebrations allow us to interrogate the shifting uses of performance in the empire’s center and periphery. Such spectacles could work to contain and manipulate public sentiment, but at other moments they questioned sanctioned power structures. A study of zarzuela texts, opera libretti, notated music, paintings, poems, and historical documents shows that an array of people took advantage of this festive moment to question the empire’s policies in surprising ways. Sensorial experience played a crucial role during these celebrations. For its part, the Crown engaged a variety of senses, especially sight, sound, and smell, in order to augment the impact of royal spectacles. But simultaneously, those who questioned the Crown also did so through an engagement of the sensorial world.

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Shredding the Map

Imagined Geographies of Revolutionary Russia, 1914-1922

Edith W. Clowes

Amherst College Press, 2024

Shredding the Map investigates Russian place consciousness in the decade between the start of World War I and the end of the Russian civil war. Attachment to place is a vital aspect of human identity, and connection to homeland, whether imagined or real, can be especially powerful. Drawing from a large digital database of period literature, Shredding the Map investigates the metamorphic changes in how Russians related to places–whether abstractions like “country” or concrete spaces of borders, fronts, and edgelands–during these years.

An innovative, digitally-aided study of Russia’s “imagined geography” during the early decades of the twentieth century, Shredding the Map uncovers vying emotional patterns and responses to Russian ideas of place, some familiar and some quite new. The book includes new visualizations that connect otherwise invisible networks of shared place, feeling, and perception among dozens of writers in order to trace patterns of geospatial identity. A scholarly companion to the “Mapping Imagined Geographies of Revolutionary Russia” website and database, this book offers an innovative analysis of place and identity beyond the centers of power, enhancing our perceptions of Russia and encouraging debate about the possibilities for digital humanities and literary analysis.

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Writing for Justice

Victor Séjour, the Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, and the Age of Transatlantic Emancipations

Elèna Mortara

Dartmouth College Press, 2015

In Writing for Justice, Elèna Mortara presents a richly layered study of the cultural and intellectual atmosphere of mid-nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, through close readings of the life and work of Victor Séjour, an expat American Creole from New Orleans living in Paris. In addition to writing The Mulatto, an early story on slavery in Saint-Domingue, Séjour penned La Tireuse de cartes (The Fortune-Teller, 1859), a popular play based on the famed Mortara case. In this historical incident, Pope Pius IX kidnapped Edgardo Mortara, the child of a Jewish family living in the Papal States. The details of the play’s production—and its reception on both sides of the Atlantic—are intertwined with the events of the Italian Risorgimento and of pre–Civil War America. Writing for Justice is full of surprising encounters with French and American writers and historical figures, including Hugo, Hawthorne, Twain, Napoleon III, Garibaldi, and Lincoln. As Elèna Mortara passionately argues, the enormous amount of public attention received by the case reveals an era of underappreciated transatlantic intellectual exchange, in which an African American writer used notions of emancipation in religious as well as racial terms, linking the plight of blacks in America to that of Jews in Europe, and to the larger battles for freedom and nationhood advancing across the continent. This book will appeal both to general readers and to scholars, including historians, literary critics, and specialists in African American studies, Jewish, Catholic, or religious studies, multilingual American literature, francophone literature, theatrical life, nineteenth-century European politics, and cross-cultural encounters.

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Writing Revolution in Latin America

From Martí to García Márquez to Bolaño

Juan E. De Castro

Vanderbilt University Press, 2019

PROSE Awards Literature Subject Category Winner, 2020

In the politically volatile period from the 1960s through the end of the twentieth century, Latin American authors were in direct dialogue with the violent realities of their time and place. Writing Revolution in Latin America is a chronological study of the way revolution and revolutionary thinking is depicted in the fiction composed from the eye of the storm.

From Mexico to Chile, the gradual ideological evolution from a revolutionary to a neoliberal mainstream was a consequence of, on the one hand, the political hardening of the Cuban Revolution beginning in the late 1960s, and, on the other, the repression, dictatorships, and economic crises of the 1970s and beyond. Not only was socialist revolution far from the utopia many believed, but the notion that guerrilla uprisings would lead to an easy socialism proved to be unfounded. Similarly, the repressive Pinochet dictatorship in Chile led to unfathomable tragedy and social mutation.

This double-edged phenomenon of revolutionary disillusionment became highly personal for Latin American authors inside and outside Castro's and Pinochet's dominion. Revolution was more than a foreign affair, it was the stuff of everyday life and, therefore, of fiction.

Juan De Castro's expansive study begins ahead of the century with José Martí in Cuba and continues through the likes of Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru, Gabriel García Márquez in Colombia, and Roberto Bolaño in Mexico (by way of Chile). The various, often contradictory ways the authors convey this precarious historical moment speaks in equal measure to the social circumstances into which these authors were thrust and to the fundamental differences in the ways they themselves witnessed history.

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