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With Haiti and the Revolution Unseen, Natalie Marie Léger alters the genealogy of the Haitian revolutionary subject in the archive of Caribbean cultural thought and shifts our attention to the revolutionists previously left out of the archive: Saint Domingue’s Africanized captives. She posits that canonical Caribbean writers of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), like C. L. R. James, Aimé Césaire, Alejo Carpentier, and Édouard Glissant, ignore the conditions of difference that inspired the captive populace’s dreams of freedom from French colonial rule. These authors replicate the forms of colonial power that they sought to vilify with their Haitian revolutionist texts because they excise the African Haitian revolutionist from the story of the Revolution. Despite the fact that two-thirds of the enslaved population were African born on the eve of the Revolution, canonized Caribbean literature of the Revolution writes the Haitian revolutionist as acculturated into the West. The absence of African Haitian revolutionists results in narratives that do not see Haitian ideas about Haiti and the Haitian Revolution. They are the stories of a Haiti and the Haitian Revolution unseen.
 
Léger writes against a Haiti- and Haitians-less idea of the Revolution. She asks scholars and artists of the Revolution to know Haitians as Ginens (African Haitians) and Haiti as Ayiti Ginen (Africa Haiti). This form of knowing demands a decolonial understanding of the Haitian Revolution and a reevaluation of its stories as told by influential twentieth-century Caribbean writers. The story she tells showcases the immense political impact of the African Haitian revolutionist’s philosophies of freedom in Saint Domingue and Haiti thereafter; and she argues that the absence of these philosophies in Caribbean classics of the Revolution demands consideration of why these classics continue to shape how the Revolution and Haiti are discussed in Caribbean Studies, Black Studies, Postcolonial Studies and Haitian Studies. More pressingly, Léger calls on artists and scholars of the Revolution to be mindful of how Haiti and Haitians are figured in narratives of the Revolution. The immense space Haiti holds in Caribbean imaginings of freedom and revolution makes mediating it, its Revolution, and peoples through a prejudiced gaze that serves the West hugely problematic, since a denigrated Haiti yields stunted visions of the Caribbean’s future. These conditions require attention to the pervasive presence of colonial paradigms for being in classic literatures of the Revolution and the way they undermine the generative manner Caribbean writers have used Haiti to think through their past, present, and future.

"Hanif Kureishi is a proper Englishman. Almost." So observes biographer Kenneth Kaleta. Well known for his films My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, the Anglo-Asian screenwriter, essayist, and novelist has become one of the leading portrayers of Britain's multicultural society. His work raises important questions of personal and national identity as it probes the experience of growing up in one culture with roots in another, very different one.

This book is the first critical biography of Hanif Kureishi. Kenneth Kaleta interviewed Kureishi over several years and enjoyed unlimited access to all of his working papers, journals, and personal files. From this rich cache of material, he opens a fascinating window onto Kureishi's creative process, tracing such works as My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, The Buddha of Suburbia, London Kills Me, The Black Album, and Love in a Blue Time from their genesis to their public reception. Writing for Kureishi fans as well as film and cultural studies scholars, Kaleta pieces together a vivid mosaic of the postcolonial, hybrid British culture that has nourished Kureishi and his work.

Ernest Hemingway is most often associated with Spain and Cuba, but Italy was equally important in his life and work. Hemingway in Italy, the first full-length book exploring Hemmingway’s penchant for Italy, offers a lively account of the many visits Hemingway made throughout his life to Italian locales, including Sicily, Genoa, Rapallo, Cortina, and Venice. 

In evocative prose, complemented by a rich selection of historical images, Richard Owen takes us on a tour through Hemingway’s Italy. He describes how Hemingway first visited the country of the Latins during World War I, an experience that set the scene for A Farewell to Arms. Then after World War II, it was in Italy that he found inspiration for Across the River and into the Trees. Again and again, the Italian landscape—from the Venetian lagoon to the Dolomites and beyond—deeply affected one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Hemingway in Italy demonstrates that Italy stands alongside Spain as a key influence on Hemingway’s work—and why the Italians themselves hold Hemingway and his writing close to their hearts.

Revealing how Spain, Mexico, and Cuba helped shape the literary origins of American national identity.

In Hispanicism and Early US Literature, author John C. Havard posits that representations of Spain, Spanish America, Spanishness, and Spanish Americanness are integral elements in the evolution of early national and antebellum US literature. He argues that Spanish-speaking countries have long held a broad fascination for Americans and that stock narratives regarding these peoples were central to the period’s US literature.

Beginning with the work of eighteenth-century literary nationalists such as Joel Barlow, US literature has been drawn to reflect on Spain and Spanish America. Such reflection was often inspired by geopolitical conflicts such as US expansion into Spanish Louisiana and the US-Mexican War. Havard terms the discourse emerging from these reflections “Hispanicism.” This discourse was used to portray the dominant viewpoint of classical liberalism that propounded an American exceptionalism premised on the idea that Hispanophone peoples were comparatively lacking the capacity for self-determination, hence rationalizing imperialism. On the conservative side were warnings against progress through conquest.

Havard delves into selected works of early national and antebellum literature on Spain and Spanish America to illuminate US national identity. Poetry and novels by Joel Barlow, James Fenimore Cooper, and Herman Melville are mined to further his arguments regarding identity, liberalism, and conservatism. Understudied authors Mary Peabody Mann and José Antonio Saco are held up to contrast American and Cuban views on Hispanicism and Cuban annexation as well as to develop the focus on nationality and ideology via differences in views on liberalism.

More than just a work of literary criticism, there is a substantial amount of cultural and political history discussed. Havard’s use of archival sources such as political articles and personal correspondence elucidates not just literary genres and movements such as early national epic poetry, abolitionist fiction, and the American Renaissance, but also US prominent culture.

It is commonplace among literary critics to refer to William Faulkner's influence on Spanish American literature. Yet few studies have delved seriously into why the attraction of the writings of this southerner has been so powerful. In this bold new study, Deborah N. Cohn addresses this question squarely, from two perspectives.

First, Cohn proposes that Faulkner's appeal derives from Spanish American authors' perception of similarities between the South's history and the experiences of their own respective nations. She delineates historical experiences common to the South and Spanish America, including civil wars, defeat and dispossession, regional marginalization, and socio-economic hardship. She also suggests that Spanish American authors found in Faulkner a set of concerns with which they could identify and that, as a result, they were inspired to take up the stylistic innovations characteristic of his writing. The resulting assimilation and adaptation of Euro-American modernism through Faulkner has been an indispensable part of what is known as la nueva narrativa, "the new narrative," as well as of successive movements in Spanish American literature.

From another perspective, Cohn's book shows points of contact between works by other southern and Spanish American novelists without positing relations of influence. Specifically, after identifying common, recurrent themes in modern southern and Spanish American literature in general, Cohn reveals levels of a shared understanding of regional history in Faulkner and Mario Vargas Llosa, in Ralph Ellison and Isabel Allende, as well as in Katherine Anne Porter and Juan Rulfo. Her analyses compare and contrast these authors' shared attempts to provide correctives to official, mainstream historical discourse through alternate, parallel strategies for reconstructing, recording, and reclaiming the past.

In yoking together the South and Spanish America as neighboring spaces with similar personalities, Cohn advances a daring and controversial thesis that both narrows and enhances the frame of comparison between the literatures of the South and Spanish America.

Greek tragedy has held sway over the imagination of audiences for well over two millennia. This collection of essays on Athenian drama, the proceedings of a conference held at the University of Texas at Austin in 1992, demonstrates that Greek tragedy still retains its power to provoke debate and to engage the interest of specialists and non-classicists alike.

The book includes essays by seven of the foremost scholars of Greek drama—Helene Foley, Michelle Gellrich, Peter W. Rose, David Rosenbloom, Richard Seaford, Bernd Seidensticker, and Froma I. Zeitlin. These writers explore the work of all three great tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and approach them from a variety of perspectives on history and theory, including poststructuralism and Marxism. They investigate the possibilities for coordinating theoretically informed readings of tragedy with a renewed attention to the pressure of material history within those texts. The collection thus represents a response within classics to "New Historicism" and the debates it has generated within related literary disciplines.

The career of Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) has been hard to categorize. As an Anglo-lrish writer, a follower of the modernists but not technically one herself; as an independent woman writer but not, by her admission, a feminist; and as a creative writer in time of war, she has eluded compartmentalization. In How Will the Heart Endure, Heather Bryant Jordan provides a new assessment of Bowen’s achievement, arguing that Bowen’s response to war is the best lens for elucidating the relation between art and life expressed in Bowen’s work.Bowen created novels, short stories, essays, and autobiographical works in a war-torn world that saw successively the Troubles in Ireland, the Irish Civil War, World War I, and World War Il. The strains she felt as a result of these experiences were expressed in the intensely personal vision of loss and betrayal that her fiction conveys.Jordan’s study combines historical and literary analysis and incorporates new archival research on Bowen’s correspondence and on her war reports to the Ministry of Information. How Will the Heart Endure offers not only a new reading of Bowen’s work, but an insightful look into the wartime publishing climate in which Bowen and her circle—which included Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, John and Rosalind Lehmann, Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Stephen Spender—operated. It will be of interest to specialists in modern British fiction, women’s studies, Irish studies, and Anglo-lrish literature.