front cover of Eureka
Eureka
Edgar Allan Poe
University of Illinois Press, 2004
Originally published in 1848, Eureka is Poe's book on how the universe was formed, how it functions, and what its future might be. Poe provides a physical, scientific explanation for the interconnectedness of all things--an idea at the heart of much of nineteenth-century romanticism and American Transcendentalism in particular. 
 
This user-friendly edition puts Eureka in context, explaining Poe's excellent grasp of then-new developments in astronomy, his often-prescient projections from what was known to what might come next (Poe is especially good on space-time), and the close connections between Eureka and the thought and attitudes of his era.
 
Through extensive annotations this edition of Eureka demonstrates intimate connections with Poe's poetry, fiction, and criticism, with his career and aspirations, his humor and satire, and his love of grand literary effects.
 
It also presents a carefully edited text, including Poe's own emendations from several copies which he marked for the revised reprinting that he hoped would follow, and related documents
 
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front cover of Food and Work in the Americas
Food and Work in the Americas
Susan Levine and Steve Striffler, special issue editors
Duke University Press
This special issue challenges historians to think about food and labor by considering how not only producing but acquiring, preparing, eating, and enjoying food are central to working-class life and capitalist transformation. Its essays bring labor history into closer conversation with the interdisciplinary perspectives of food studies to explore how broadly and deeply food experiences and working lives shape one another. Contributors trace this relationship through a series of case studies from across the Americas, including discussions of Native American life during the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, African American food workers in the early twentieth century, Puerto Rican sugarcane workers under US imperialism, and the politics of fair trade.

Susan Levine is Professor of History and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program. Steve Striffler is the Doris Zemurray Stone Chair in Latin American Studies and Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Orleans. He is the author of In the Shadows of State and Capital: The United Fruit Company, Popular Struggle, and Agrarian Restructuring in Ecuador, 19001995, also published by Duke University Press.

Contributors: William Bauer, Sarah Besky, Sandy Brown, Rachel Herrmann, Felicia Kornbluh, Susan Levine, Sarah Lyon, Vanessa May, April Merleaux, Liesl Orenic, Sara Ries, Steve Striffler
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Poe's Critical Theory
THE MAJOR DOCUMENTS
Edgar Allan Poe
University of Illinois Press, 2007
Edgar Allan Poe's reputation as an enduring and influential American literary critic rests mainly upon the pieces in this edition. Editors Stuart and Susan F. Levine provide reading texts, detailed explanatory footnotes, variant readings, and introductions to show context. They also face frankly the contradictions in Poe's critical opinions. Poe argues both that poetry is for pleasure, not truth, and that poetic inspiration leads to truth. Great works, Poe maintains, result from studied calculation, but also from irrational, supernal sources. Poe, both a biting critic and the doughty defender of American artistic achievement, was contemptuous of democratic art--except when vigorously defending it. Critical Theory highlights such conflicting ideas and suggests why they are present.

What was consistent in Poe's work was not a single theory, but rather wit, playfulness, concern for the strong effect, a bin of recyclable allusions, anecdotes and quotations, and a craftsman's discipline. Poe's writing on theory is of a piece with his fiction, poetry, and journalism. The Levines explain how these critical statements also tie tightly to the social, political, economic, and technological history of the world in which Poe lived.

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The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe
AN ANNOTATED EDITION
Edited by Stuart Levine and Susan Levine
University of Illinois Press, 1990
The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe brings together, in one convenient edition, all of the information a reader needs to understand Poe's stories. Readable, attractive, and accessible to a general reader or student, it also provides a useful resource for the scholar and specialist. Stuart Levine and Susan Levine tracked down information that is often highly specialized and hard to come by through an extensive program of literary sleuthing—an investigation that took him through the hundreds of places where scholars make their contributions to knowledge.
 
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