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The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) is one of the best-known and active national organizations that represent Mexican Americans and their political interests. Since its founding in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1929, it has served as a vehicle through which Mexican Americans can strive for equal rights and economic assimilation into Anglo American society.

This study is the first comprehensive political history of LULAC from its founding through the 1980s. Márquez explores the group’s evolution from an activist, grassroots organization in the pre– and post–World War II periods to its current status as an institutionalized bureaucracy that relies heavily on outside funding to further its politically conservative goals. His information is based in part on many primary source materials from the LULAC archives at the University of Texas at Austin, the Houston Public Library, and the University LULAC publications, as well as interviews with present and past LULAC activists.

Márquez places this history within the larger theoretical framework of incentive theory to show how changing, and sometimes declining, membership rewards have influenced people’s participation in LULAC and other interest groups over time. Ironically, as of 1988, LULAC could claim fewer than 5,000 dues-paying members, yet a dedicated and skillful leadership secured sufficient government and corporate monies to make LULAC one of the most visible and active groups in Mexican American politics.

Given the increasing number of interest groups and political action committees involved in national politics in the United States, this case study of a political organization’s evolution will be of interest to a wide audience in the political and social sciences, as well as to students of Mexican American and ethnic studies.

In a new approach to interdisciplinary literary theory, Literature, Analytically Speaking integrates literary studies with analytic aesthetics, girded by neo-Darwinian evolution. Scrutinizing narrative fiction through a lens provided by analytic philosophy, revered literary theorist Peter Swirski puts new life into literary theory while fashioning a set of practical guidelines for critics in the interpretive trenches.

Dismissing critical inquirers who deny intention its key role in the study of literary reception, Swirski extends the defense of intentionality to art and to human behavior in general. In the process, Swirski takes stock of the recent work in evolutionary theory, arguing that the analysis of narrative truth may be grounded in the neo-Darwinian paradigm which forms the empirical backbone behind his analytic approach. Literature, Analytically Speaking provides a series of precepts designed to capture the ways in which we do interpret (and ought to interpret) works of literature. Reflecting a resounding shift from the poststructuralist paradigm, Swirski's lively and colorful presentation, backed up by a dazzling variety of examples and case studies, reconceptualizes the aesthetics of literature and literary studies.

The definitive history of how Latin American studies became a major field in American scholarship.

Looking South: The Evolution of Latin Americanist Scholarship in the United States, 1850-1975 is the first comprehensive history of the development of Latin American studies as a field of academic inquiry in the United States. In this ambitious and insightful work, historian Helen Delpar traces more than a century of intellectual engagement with Latin America, revealing how generations of historians, anthropologists, geographers, economists, sociologists, and political scientists shaped American understandings of the region and transformed Latin American studies into a recognized academic discipline.

A central contribution of the book lies in its exploration of the relationship between scholarship and historical context. Delpar demonstrates that academic interest in Latin America was never isolated from larger political, economic, and cultural developments in the United States. The expansion of hemispheric trade, the Good Neighbor era, World War II, the Cold War, and the Cuban Revolution all influenced how American scholars approached the region and what questions they considered important. By examining these intersections, she reveals how academic knowledge is shaped by changing national priorities, international events, and institutional support networks.

Beyond its contributions to Latin American history, Looking South is a major work of intellectual and academic history. It offers a compelling account of how scholarly fields are created, how academic communities develop, and how knowledge about world regions is produced, organized, and disseminated. Delpar's careful attention to both individual scholars and larger institutional structures makes the book an essential resource for understanding the history of area studies, the social sciences, and higher education in the United States.

Looking South remains an indispensable guide to the origins and evolution of Latin Americanist scholarship. It is essential reading for historians, Latin Americanists, anthropologists, political scientists, educators, and anyone interested in the intellectual history of the Americas and the development of knowledge across national and cultural boundaries.

William Blake is usually regarded as the greatest poet of mysticism in the English language. His primary theme is love -- love of God, love of the Divine Humanity that he often equated with God, and the sexual love that he regarded sometimes as an embodiment and sometimes as a parody of divine love. For Blake, love was not so much a virtue as a problem, a problem that he reassessed in different ways throughout his life, using a variety of logical tools. Love and logic may seem an unusual pair of concerns, especially for a visionary poet, but author Stephen Cox believes that in Blake's work the problems of love and logic evolve together, constantly influencing each other and determining the structure of the poet's vision.Scholars who have come to view Blake as a visionary whose work followed nonlinear processes have advanced the notion that his artistic achievement defies conventional interpretation. Love and Logic challenges the tendency in postmodern criticism to see authors and readers as confined by history, language, and logic, denied the ability discover truth or to communicate it in determinate form. Love and Logic emphasizes Blake's ambitious quest for truth, his desire to keep telling the story of human and divine love until he got it right, using all the strategies of logic available to him.Cox points to what he sees as the irony of Blake’s relationship to his postmodern admirers: although his goals and values are antithetical to theirs, he encounters grave difficulties when he handles logic in some of the ways in which they do. In this connection, Love and Logic’s analysis of the the problems of logical “substantialism” is especially important. The analysis develops the idea that it is not logic itself but a particular way of using logic that produces an effect of logical self-imprisonment.