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Agony for Others investigates the phenomenological, rhetorical, and political challenges of representing pain in literature. Pain cries vary between cultural and linguistic groups, and pain expression (such as grimacing or crying) can likewise vary in quality and intensity from person to person, affected by disability, temperament, and past experiences with pain, as well as the experiencer’s own understanding of what that pain is and what it means. Jessica Colangelo explores pain's role as a subjective indication of objective damage; that, contrary to claims of its subjective privacy, the feeling of pain is always felt in terms of an objectively existing entity (one’s physical body) which is perceivable by others. Thus, pain enters into intersubjectivity through the physical body—one's expressions, words, actions, presence—which then mediates between the self and the other.

Drawing on disability studies, phenomenology, philosophy, and literary studies, Colangelo examines works by Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Sarah Kane, Elie Wiesel, and Margaret Edson to argue that the belief that pain is incommunicable and thought-destroying obscures its central role in relationships and community formation. Agony for Others demonstrates that pain is not excluded from, but rather constitutive of, intersubjectivity, and argues that the aesthetic dimension of interpretation is essential to understanding the ethical and political role of pain.

American and British Writers in Mexico is the study that laid the foundation upon which subsequent examinations of Mexico’s impact upon American and British letters have built. Chosen by the Mexican government to be placed, in translation, in its public libraries, the book was also referenced by Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz in an article in the New Yorker, “Reflections—Mexico and the United States.” Drewey Wayne Gunn demonstrates how Mexican experiences had a singular impact upon the development of English writers, beginning with early British explorers who recorded their impressions for Hakluyt’s Voyages, through the American Beats, who sought to escape the strictures of American culture.

Among the 140 or so writers considered are Stephen Crane, Ambrose Bierce, Langston Hughes, D. H. Lawrence, Somerset Maugham, Katherine Anne Porter, Hart Crane, Malcolm Lowry, John Steinbeck, Graham Greene, Tennessee Williams, Saul Bellow, William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, Ray Bradbury, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac.

Gunn finds that, while certain elements reflecting the Mexican experience—colors, landscape, manners, political atmosphere, a sense of the alien—are common in their writings, the authors reveal less about Mexico than they do about themselves. A Mexican sojourn often marked the beginning, the end, or the turning point in a literary career. The insights that this pioneering study provide into our complex cultural relationship with Mexico, so different from American and British authors’ encounters with Continental cultures, remain vital. The book is essential for anyone interested in understanding the full range of the impact of the expatriate experience on writers.

What is the difference between public and private feeling, and how far can we deduce past feelings from the words that have been left us? Why do child deaths figure so often and so prominently in the literature of the nineteenth century, and how was the theme of the death of a child used to elicit such poignant responses in the readers of that era? In this fascinating new book, Laurence Lerner vividly contrasts the contempt with which twentieth- century criticism so often dismisses such works as mere sentimentality with the enthusiasm and tears of nineteenth-century contemporaries.

Drawing examples from both real and literary deaths, Lerner delves into the writings of well-known authors such as Dickens, Coleridge, Shelley, Flaubert, Mann, Huxley, and Hesse, as well as lesser known writers like Felicia Hemans and Lydia Sigourney. In the process, he synthesizes fresh ideas about the thorny subjects of sentimentality, aesthetic judgment, and the function of religion in literature.

Lerner's forthright and evocative prose style is enjoyable reading, and he excels in teasing out the moral implications and the psychosocial entanglements of his chosen narrative and lyrical texts. This is a book that will illuminate an important aspect of the history of private life. It should have wide application for those interested in the history, sociology, and literature of the nineteenth century.