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Deliberation, in recent years, has emerged as a form of civic engagement worth reclaiming. In this persuasive book, Sandra M. Gustafson combines historical literary analysis and political theory in order to demonstrate that current democratic practices of deliberation are rooted in the civic rhetoric that flourished in the early American republic.

Though the U.S. Constitution made deliberation central to republican self-governance, the ethical emphasis on group deliberation often conflicted with the rhetorical focus on persuasive speech. From Alexis de Tocqueville’s ideas about the deliberative basis of American democracy through the works of Walt Whitman, John Dewey, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., Gustafson shows how writers and speakers have made the aesthetic and political possibilities of deliberation central to their autobiographies, manifestos, novels, and orations. Examining seven key writers from the early American republic—including James Fenimore Cooper, David Crockett, and Daniel Webster—whose works of deliberative imagination explored the intersections of style and democratic substance, Gustafson offers a mode of historical and textual analysis that displays the wide range of resources imaginative language can contribute to political life.

Defining the "common knowledge" a "literate" person should possess has provoked intense debate ever since the publication of E. D. Hirsch's controversial book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Yet the basic concept of "common knowledge," Ramona Fernandez argues, is a Eurocentric model ill-suited to a society composed of many distinct cultures and many local knowledges.

In this book, Fernandez decodes the ideological assumptions that underlie prevailing models of cultural literacy as she offers new ways of imagining and modeling mixed cultural and non-print literacies. In particular, she challenges the biases inherent in the "encyclopedias" of knowledge promulgated by E. D. Hirsch and others, by Disney World's EPCOT Center, and by the Smithsonian Institution. In contrast to these, she places the writings of Zora Neale Hurston, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Leslie Marmon Silko, whose works model a cultural literacy that weaves connections across many local knowledges and many ways of knowing.

This book examines early modern texts that portray Mary Tudor’s girlhood and betrothal to a foreign prince, her brief marriage to the aging king of France, and her untimely widowhood, as well as retrospective accounts that depict her life in France, her relationships with her husband and his heir apparent, and her surreptitious romance and clandestine marriage to an English duke. Here, texts from England are put into conversation with a significant body of work that was written in French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin, culminating in an examination of a novel from North America that passed itself off as a genuine sixteenth-century memoir. Author JoAnn DellaNeva also examines a spectrum of extra-literary texts—such as dialogues, popular songs, letters, speeches, portraiture, tapestries, fashion, jewelry, and book illuminations—for the ways they too helped shape Mary’s image. In so doing, she analyzes the intersection of history and literature, demonstrating how porous the borders between these disciplines can be. Through a series of close readings that are informed by an examination of the cultural context behind these texts, Imagining Mary Tudor, Queen of France seeks to explain how Mary’s fictional biography proved to be so slippery, vacillating between portrayals of her as a virtuous, generally powerless woman and as a wily and wicked minx.

Forests have always been more than just their trees. The forests in Michigan (and similar forests in other Great Lakes states such as Wisconsin and Minnesota) played a role in the American cultural imagination from the beginnings of European settlement in the early nineteenth century to the present. Our relationships with those forests have been shaped by the cultural attitudes of the times, and people have invested in them both moral and spiritual meanings.

Author John Knott draws upon such works as Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory and Robert Pogue Harrison's Forests: The Shadow of Civilization in exploring ways in which our
relationships with forests have been shaped, using Michigan---its history of settlement, popular literature, and forest management controversies---as an exemplary case. Knott looks at such well-known figures as William Bradford, James Fenimore Cooper, John Muir, John Burroughs, and Teddy Roosevelt; Ojibwa conceptions of the forest and natural world (including how Longfellow mythologized them); early explorer accounts; and contemporary literature set in the Upper Peninsula, including Jim Harrison's True North and Philip Caputo's Indian Country.

Two competing metaphors evolved over time, Knott shows: the forest as howling wilderness, impeding the progress of civilization and in need of subjugation, and the forest as temple or cathedral, worthy of reverence and protection. Imagining the Forestshows the origin and development of both.

Rethinking art, poetry, and perception through the creative disruptions of contemporary culture.

Imperfect Fit: Aesthetic Function, Facture, and Perception in Art and Writing since 1950 is an expansive and incisive examination of the patterns of connectedness in contemporary art and poetry. Allen Fisher—a highly accomplished poet, painter, critic, and art historian as well as a key figure in the British poetry revival of the 1960s and 1970s—has a close and discerning connection to his subjects.

In Imperfect Fit, Fisher focuses on the role of fracturing, ruptures, and breakages in many traditional ties between art and poetry, as well as the resulting use of collage and assemblage by practitioners of those arts. Fisher addresses, among other subjects, destruction as a signifier in twentieth-century art; the poetic employment of bureaucratic vocabularies and “business speak”; and the roles of public performance and memory loss in the fashioning of human knowledge and art.

Commonplace notions of coherence, logic, and truth are reimagined and deconstructed in this study, and Fisher concludes by suggesting that contemporary culture offers a particularly robust opportunity—and even necessity—to engage in the production of art as a pragmatic act. Scholars of art, poetry, and aesthetics will be engaged and challenged by this insightful work.

A century ago, activists confronting racism and colonialism—in India, South Africa, and Black America—used print media to connect with one another. Then, as now, the most effective medium for their undertakings was the English language. Imperfect Solidarities: Tagore, Gandhi, Du Bois, and the Global Anglophone tells the story of this interconnected Anglophone world. Through Rabindranath Tagore’s writings on China, Mahatma Gandhi’s recollections of South Africa, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s invocations of India, Madhumita Lahiri theorizes print internationalism. This methodology requires new terms within the worldwide hegemony of the English language (“the global Anglophone”) in order to encourage alternate geographies (such as the Global South) and new collectivities (such as people of color).

The women of print internationalism feature prominently in this account. Sonja Schlesin, born in Moscow, worked with Indians in South Africa. Sister Nivedita, an Irish woman in India, collaborated with a Japanese historian. Jessie Redmon Fauset, an African American, brought the world home to young readers through her work as an author and editor.

Reading across races and regions, genres and genders, Imperfect Solidarities demonstrates the utility of the neologism for postcolonial literary studies.

Demonstrating how art and literature remain vital to alternative imaginaries beyond the power of imperialism and modernization

Imperial Decay: Literature, Autonomy, and the End of Modernization in the Americas employs a dynamic, comparative approach to contemporary literature and visual art, showing how fiction, photography, poetry, and film from Latin America and the United States vividly illuminate the present. Focusing on the period from the end of the Cold War to the financial crisis of the late 2000s, Emilio Sauri contends that what brings these media together is not just the history of hemispheric connections but also, and more strikingly, the question of the artwork’s autonomy.

Elaborating on influential accounts that reveal how US hegemony in Latin America and the resistance it inspired throughout the region are bound up with the promise of modernization, Imperial Decay offers unique insights into the hollowing out of this promise at the end of the so-called American Century. Tracing this commitment back to the modernisms of the last century and forward to more recent works, this book casts canonical figures such as Ernest Hemingway, Walker Evans, and Gabriel García Márquez in a new and necessary light while developing a compelling interpretive framework for contemporary writers and artists from across the region, including Roberto Bolaño and Benjamin Kunkel, Alejandro Cartagena and Yvonne Venegas, and Kleber Mendonça Filho. Ultimately, Sauri shows why the work of art remains vital to the task of envisioning alternatives to the immiserations, ecological devastation, and degraded forms of life wrought by imperial decay.

Illuminates the intersections between colonial thought and homosexuality

An exploration of the intersection of colonialism and homosexuality in fiction and travel writing from Robinson Crusoe to the present, this volume brings together two dynamic fields of academic inquiry: colonial discourse analysis, which considers literary texts as expressions of colonial power; and queer theory, which interrogates the representation, enforcement, and subversions of sexualities in literature and culture.

A new critical edition of Sutton Griggs’s turn-of-the-twentieth-century novel, which continues to shed light on understandings of Black politics.

Sutton E. Griggs’s first novel, originally published in 1899, paints a searing picture of the violent enforcement of disfranchisement and Jim Crow racial segregation. Based on events of the time, including US imperial policies, revolutionary movements, and racial protests, Imperium in Imperio introduces the fictional Belton Piedmont and Bernard Belgrave as “future leaders of their race” and uses these characters to make sense of the violence that marked the dawn of the twentieth century. Taking on contemporary battles over separatism and integration, Griggs’s novel continues to play a crucial role in understandings of Black politics.

Edited and introduced by Tess Chakkalakal and Kenneth W. Warren, this new critical edition offers not only an incisive biographical and historical introduction to the novel and its author but also a wealth of references that make the events and characters of Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio, and its aftermath, accessible to readers today.

An examination of early American literature that highlights how racial divides exacerbated—and were exacerbated by—the spread of infection

In April of 1721, the HMS Seahorse arrived in Boston from the West Indies, causing a smallpox epidemic that would plague the city for the next year. Of its 12,000 inhabitants, nearly fifty percent were infected, and 900 people died. Like the coronavirus pandemic that began in 2020, the outbreak also brought to the surface deep divides in the social fabric of colonial New England and laid the groundwork for racialized political inequities that we continue to grapple with today.

In Contagion’s Wake examines a range of American outbreak narratives, both historical and fictional, written between the early 1700s and the early 1900s—from the rise of inoculation through the advent of germ theory. Author Kelly L. Bezio argues that during this period, literature about communicable disease was dominated by white authors, such as Cotton Mather and Edgar Allen Poe, who tended to privilege white suffering and survival while obscuring Black suffering and vulnerability. Black authors, however, such as Olaudah Equiano and Frances E.W. Harper, developed variations on plot structures, metaphors, and imagery that drew upon contagion to represent racial injustice and further the cause of Black liberation.

The diverse texts Bezio analyzes vary extensively in genre and geographical location, and in the illnesses that feature in their pages. Significant disorders from the era, including yellow fever, smallpox, consumption, and cholera, make frequent appearances, as do less culturally dominant diseases such as St. Anthony’s Fire. In Contagion’s Wake contends that representations of communicable disease should not be understood only as within their own historical moment; rather, they function more like a DNA code for our present time.