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An author’s true meaning has always been largely a matter of opinion among literary critics, even when only objective language was analyzed. However, a writer’s inner meaning, which perhaps not even he or she consciously realizes, interests the “new critics,” who base their theory of criticism on the writings of Immanuel Kant and hold philosophical values to be essential in studying a literary work.

William J. Handy, a former student of John Crowe Ransom, himself a critic of note, reveals the inadequacy of logical concept to represent the full quality of human experience. In Kant and the Southern New Critics he discusses the theories and practices of some pioneers of philosophical criticism—John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and others—and traces the influence of the Kantian generative idea on their assumption that a work of art is the celebration of one’s qualitative experience.

Critics in the new school believe that knowledge of experience is distorted when abstracted into scientific, quantitative notations, and that the artist, to portray things in their more natural state, must employ particulars in order to achieve “universals.” Knowledge of any subject or object must include the aesthetic qualities of imagination and emotion that cannot be discovered through analysis.

This study explores Ransom’s theory of “ontological criticism.” The basic difference in symbols representing things and those representing ideas was discerned by Kant, who distinguished between understanding (analysis of an object in order to classify it)and imagination (realization of an object undistorted by logical reduction). Handysuggests that ontological structure requires a writer to use the logic that springs from his image-making faculty—a thought also expressed by T. S. Eliot, who says, “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative.’ ”

The discipline of philosophical aesthetics is necessary for the critic, Handy says, if his principles are to be substantial enough to make a significant contribution to knowledge of literary theory. This book clearly delineates the origins of a philosophical approach and leads the reader to an appreciation of the deeper enjoyment and meaning it can give to literary experience.

In 1920, an unknown journalist named Katherine Anne Porter first sojourned in Mexico. When she left her "familiar country" for the last time in 1931, she was the celebrated author of Flowering Judas and Other Stories and had accumulated a wealth of experiences and impressions that would inspire numerous short stories, essays, and reviews, as well as the opening section of her only novel, Ship of Fools.

In this perceptive study of Porter's Mexican experiences, Thomas Walsh traces the important connections between those events and her literary works. Separating fact from the fictions that Porter constantly created about her life, he follows the active role that she played in Mexican political and intellectual life—even to the discovery of a plot to overthrow the Mexican government, which eventually figured in Flowering Judas.

Most important, Walsh discerns how the great swings between depression and elation that characterized Porter's emotional life influenced her alternating visions of Mexico. In such works as "Xochimilco," Porter saw Mexico as an earthly Eden where hopes for a better society could be realized, but in other stories, including "The Fiesta of Guadalupe," she depicts Mexico as a place of hopeless oppression for the native peoples.

Mexico, Porter once said, gave her back her Texas past. Given the unhappiness of that past, her feelings toward Mexico would always be ambivalent, but her Mexican experiences influenced all her subsequent works to some degree, even those pieces not specifically Mexican in setting. Walsh's study, then, is an essential key for anyone seeking greater understanding of the life or works of Katherine Anne Porter.

The only unexpurgated collection of Katherine Mansfield’s private writings-now available for the first time!

Edited by Margaret Scott

The Vietnam War (1964–1975) divided American society like no other war of the twentieth century, and some of the most memorable American art and art-related activism of the last fifty years protested U.S. involvement. At a time when Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art dominated the American art world, individual artists and art collectives played a significant role in antiwar protest and inspired subsequent generations of artists. This significant story of engagement, which has never been covered in a book-length survey before, is the subject of Kill for Peace.

Writing for both general and academic audiences, Matthew Israel recounts the major moments in the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement and describes artists’ individual and collective responses to them. He discusses major artists such as Leon Golub, Edward Kienholz, Martha Rosler, Peter Saul, Nancy Spero, and Robert Morris; artists’ groups including the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) and the Artists Protest Committee (APC); and iconic works of collective protest art such as AWC’s Q. And Babies? A. And Babies and APC’s The Artists Tower of Protest. Israel also formulates a typology of antiwar engagement, identifying and naming artists’ approaches to protest. These approaches range from extra-aesthetic actions—advertisements, strikes, walk-outs, and petitions without a visual aspect—to advance memorials, which were war memorials purposefully created before the war’s end that criticized both the war and the form and content of traditional war memorials.

"The study of transracial adoption has long been dominated by historians, legal scholars, and social scientists, but with the growth of the lively field of humanistic adoption studies comes a growing understanding of the importance of cultural representations to the social meanings and even the practices of adoption itself . . . This book makes a valuable contribution in showing how important the theme of adoption has been throughout the twentieth century in representations of race relations, and in showing that the adoption theme has served to challenge racial norms as well as uphold them."
---Margaret Homans, Yale University

The subject of transracial adoption seems to be enjoying unprecedented media attention of late, particularly as white celebrities have made headlines by adopting children of color from overseas. But interest in transracial adoption is nothing new---it has long occupied a space in the public imagination, a space disproportionate with the number of people actually adopted across racial lines.

Even before World War II, when transracial adoption was neither legally nor socially sanctioned, American authors wrote about it, often depicting it as an "accident"---the result of racial ambiguity that prevented adopters from knowing who is white or black. After World War II, as the real-world practice of transracial and international adoption increased, American literary representations of it became an index not only of the changing cultural attitudes toward adoption as a way of creating families but also of the social issues that informed it and made it, at times, controversial.

Kin of Another Kind examines the appearance of transracial adoption in American literature at certain key moments from the turn of the twentieth century to the turn of the twenty-first to help understand its literary and social significance to authors and readers alike. In juxtaposing representations of African American, American Indian, and Korean and Chinese adoptions across racial (and national) lines, Kin of Another Kind traces the metaphorical significance of adoption when it appears in fiction. At the same time, aligning these groups calls attention to their unique and divergent cultural histories with adoption, which serve as important contexts for the fiction discussed in this study.

The book explores the fiction of canonical authors such as William Faulkner and Toni Morrison and places it alongside lesser-known works by Robert E. Boles, Dallas Chief Eagle (Lakota), and Sui Sin Far that, when reconsidered, can advance our understanding both of adoption in literature and of twentieth-century American literature in general.

Kin of Another Kind will appeal to students and scholars in adoption in literature, American literature, and comparative multiethnic literatures. It adds to the growing body of work on adoption in literature, which focuses on orphancy and adoption in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Cynthia Callahan is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Ohio State University, Mansfield.

Sometimes described as “America's deadliest war,” King Philip's War proved a critical turning point in the history of New England, leaving English colonists decisively in command of the region at the expense of native peoples. Although traditionally understood as an inevitable clash of cultures or as a classic example of conflict on the frontier between Indians and whites, in the view of James D. Drake it was neither. Instead, he argues, King Philip's War was a civil war, whose divisions cut across ethnic lines and tore apart a society composed of English colonizers and Native Americans alike. According to Drake, the interdependence that developed between English and Indian in the years leading up to the war helps explain its notorious brutality. Believing they were dealing with an internal rebellion and therefore with an act of treason, the colonists and their native allies often meted out harsh punishments. The end result was nothing less than the decimation of New England's indigenous peoples and the consequent social, political, and cultural reorganization of the region. In short, by waging war among themselves, the English and Indians of New England destroyed the world they had constructed together. In its place a new society emerged, one in which native peoples were marginalized and the culture of the New England Way receded into the past.

Scholars no longer see Jonathan Edwards as the fire-and-brimstone preacher who deemed his parishioners “sinners in the hands of an angry god.” Edwards now figures as caring and socially conscious and exerts increased influence as a philosopher of the American school of Protestantism. In this study, he becomes the progenitor of an alternative tradition in American letters.

In Knowing, Seeing, Being, Jennifer L. Leader argues that Edwards, the nineteenth-century poet Emily Dickinson, and the twentieth-century poet Marianne Moore share a heretofore underrecognized set of religious and philosophical preoccupations. She contends that they represent an alternative tradition within American literature, one that differs from Transcendentalism and is grounded in Reformed Protestantism and its ways of reading and interpreting the King James Bible and the natural world. According to Leader, these three writers' most significant commonality is the Protestant tradition of typology, a rigorous mode of interpreting scripture and nature through which certain figures or phenomena are read as the fulfillment of prophecy and of God's work. Following from their similar ways of reading, they also share philosophical and spiritual questions about language, epistemology (knowing), perception (seeing), and physical and spiritual ontology (being). In connecting Edwards to these two poets, in exploring each writer's typological imagination, and through a series of insightful readings, this innovative book reevaluates three major figures in American intellectual and literary history and compels a reconsideration of these writers and their legacies.