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Encompassing hegemonic, nonhegemonic, and pidgin languages, this compilation explores the state of literary translation studies in Latin America. 

Literary Translation in Latin America in the Twenty-First Century provides an in-depth exploration of the current landscape of literary translation studies and translation practices across Latin America. The unparalleled linguistic diversity of Latin America, with nearly five hundred languages spoken, makes translation a vital aspect of daily life. This volume aims to contribute to the analysis from a Latin American perspective, presenting a fresh reading of translation theories that originate in Latin America, as well as theoretical reflections and practical examples of literary translation by poets and artists situated in the continent. 

“This book began in what seemed like a counterfactual intuition . . . that what had been happening in Nicaraguan poetry was essential to the victory of the Nicaraguan Revolution,” write John Beverley and Marc Zimmerman. “In our own postmodern North American culture, we are long past thinking of literature as mattering much at all in the ‘real’ world, so how could this be?” This study sets out to answer that question by showing how literature has been an agent of the revolutionary process in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

The book begins by discussing theory about the relationship between literature, ideology, and politics, and charts the development of a regional system of political poetry beginning in the late nineteenth century and culminating in late twentieth-century writers. In this context, Ernesto Cardenal of Nicaragua, Roque Dalton of El Salvador, and Otto René Castillo of Guatemala are among the poets who receive detailed attention.

Can reading social protest novels actually produce a more just world? Literature and Social Justice offers a scientifically informed, evidence-based affirmative answer to that crucial question, arguing that literature has the potential—albeit largely unrealized—to produce lasting, socially transformative psychological changes in readers. Moving beyond traditional social criticism in its various forms, including feminist, gender, queer, and postcolonialist approaches, Mark Bracher uses new knowledge concerning the cognitive structures and processes that constitute the psychological roots of social injustice to develop a detailed, systematic critical strategy that he calls “schema criticism,” which can be applied to literature and other discourses to maximize and extend their potential for promoting social justice.

Bracher draws on studies in social cognition, social neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, political psychology, and psychoanalysis to uncover the root cognitive structures that cause misunderstandings among people and give rise to social injustice. Using the novels The Jungle, The Grapes of Wrath, and Native Son, he then demonstrates how schema criticism can correct these faulty cognitive structures and enable readers to develop more accurate and empathetic views of those they deem “Other,” as well as become more aware of their own cognitive processes. Calling the book “insightful, erudite, and humane,” Cognitive Approaches to Literature and Culture Series coeditor Patrick Colm Hogan says, “This inspiring book should be welcomed by literary critics, political activists, and anyone who cares about social justice.”

Highlighting efforts to address today’s most pressing social challenges through the study of texts in languages other than English.

Literature for Change examines how the study, production, circulation, and reception of literary texts in languages other than English contribute to addressing contemporary social challenges. Through eleven case studies across diverse languages and cultures, it analyzes the real-world impact of literary research, showing its relevance to sectors such as museums and heritage, the environmental and medical humanities, and the digital sphere. Combining hermeneutic and aesthetic approaches, the chapters demonstrate the value of varied methods, including theoretically grounded creative inquiry, and the connections between literary studies and other disciplines. The book affirms the importance of the field of modern languages and the continuing role of literary texts in shaping social and cultural life.

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.

In the mid-Victorian era, liberalism was a practical politics: it had a party, it informed legislation, and it had adherents who identified with and expressed it as opinion. It was also the first British political movement to depend more on people than property, and on opinion rather than interest. But how would these subjects of liberal politics actually live liberalism?

To answer this question, Elaine Hadley focuses on the key concept of individuation—how it is embodied in politics and daily life and how it is expressed through opinion, discussion and sincerity.  These are concerns that have been absent from commentary on the liberal subject. Living Liberalism argues that the properties of liberalism—citizenship, the vote, the candidate, and reform, among others—were developed in response to a chaotic and antagonistic world. In exploring how political liberalism imagined its impact on Victorian society, Hadley reveals an entirely new and unexpected prehistory of our modern liberal politics. A major revisionist account that alters our sense of the trajectory of liberalism, Living Liberalism revises our understanding of the presumption of the liberal subject.

Lowell, Massachusetts was the first fully planned industrial city in the United States, and the Boott Mill, established in the 1820s along the Merrimack River, stood at the center of this bold experiment in industrial capitalism. For decades, the company-owned boardinghouses that housed the mills' workers were as much a part of the Lowell system as the looms themselves: a managed, closely supervised domestic world where the rhythms of mill life extended from the factory floor into every corner of daily existence.

Living on the Boott brings this vanished world back to life through rigorous historical archaeology. Drawing on excavations conducted at the Boott Mills boardinghouse complex, Stephen A. Mrozowski, Grace H. Ziesing, and Mary C. Beaudry examine the material remains of the men and women who lived and worked in Lowell's textile industry from the early nineteenth century through its long decline. Through painstaking analysis of ceramics, faunal assemblages, tobacco-related artifacts, and other recovered objects, the authors reconstruct the daily lives, diets, domestic routines, and social relationships of successive generations of boardinghouse residents—from the young "mill girls" recruited from rural New England who made Lowell famous, to the Irish immigrant workers who increasingly replaced them as the century progressed.

The result is a richly documented social history written not from official records alone, but from the objects people actually used, discarded, and left behind. The book illuminates how class, gender, ethnicity, and labor intersected in the intimate spaces of the boardinghouse, and documents the profound changes in living conditions as the Lowell system evolved and the workforce transformed. A landmark contribution to historical archaeology, industrial archaeology, and the history of American labor, Living on the Boott demonstrates the unique power of archaeological evidence to recover the lives of those too often overlooked by conventional historical sources.

In closely analyzing the political and spiritual uses of black theatre during the Progressive Era, Mitchell demonstrates that audiences were shown affective ties in black families, a subject often erased in mainstream images of African Americans. Examining lynching plays as archival texts that embody and reflect broad networks of sociocultural activism and exchange in the lives of black Americans, Mitchell finds that audiences were rehearsing and improvising new ways of enduring in the face of widespread racial terrorism. Images of the black soldier, lawyer, mother, and wife helped readers assure each other that they were upstanding individuals who deserved the right to participate in national culture and politics. These powerful community coping efforts helped African Americans band together and withstand the nation's rejection of them as viable citizens.

The Left of Black interview with author Koritha Mitchell begins at 14:00.

An interview with Koritha Mitchell at The Ohio Channel.

Native Americans along the coasts of southern New England and Long Island have had close ties to whales for thousands of years. They made a living from the sea and saw in the world's largest beings special power and meaning. After English settlement in the early seventeenth century, the region's natural bounty of these creatures drew Natives and colonists alike to develop whale hunting on an industrial scale. By the nineteenth century, New England dominated the world in whaling, and Native Americans contributed substantially to whaleship crews.

In Living with Whales, Nancy Shoemaker reconstructs the history of Native whaling in New England through a diversity of primary documents: explorers' descriptions of their “first encounters,” indentures, deeds, merchants' accounts, Indian overseer reports, crew lists, memoirs, obituaries, and excerpts from journals kept by Native whalemen on their voyages. These materials span the centuries-long rise and fall of the American whalefishery and give insight into the far-reaching impact of whaling on Native North American communities. One chapter even follows a Pequot Native to New Zealand, where many of his Maori descendants still reside today.

Whaling has left behind a legacy of ambivalent emotions. In oral histories included in this volume, descendants of Wampanoag and Shinnecock whalemen reflect on how whales, whaling, and the ocean were vital to the survival of coastal Native communities in the Northeast, but at great cost to human life, family life, whales, and the ocean environment.