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PLEASURE is a book-length poem which muses on the phenomenology of solitude in a pastoral landscape, written in a diaristic, lyric mode, where the queer “I” alternately savors the decadence of isolation and stands at the precipice of despair. A travelogue in verse, PLEASURE takes place in Syros, the Greek island to which author Angelo Nikolopolous travels a few weeks after the discovery of his mother’s brain tumor. These intertextual, elliptical explorations of solitude and sensuality interweave images of seaside roaming, secluded town life, and ephemeral sexual encounters with the ubiquitous implication of death—the waning summer, the ill, perhaps dying, mother. Staring down true disconnection—both physical and psychic orphanhood —Nikolopoulos writes about the thrill and sadness of turning your back against the world and those in it only to rediscover that which tethers all to human experience: the quotidian, singular pleasures of having a body.

A Prescription for Adversity makes the revolutionary case that Ambrose Bierce, far from being a bitter misanthrope, was instead both a compassionate and moral author. Berkove, focusing on Bierce's short fiction, establishes the necessity of recognizing the pattern of his intellectual and literary development over the course of his career. The author shows that Bierce, probably the American author with the most extensive experience of the Civil War, turned to classical Stoicism and English and French Enlightenment literature in his postwar search for meaning. Bierce's fiction arose from his ultimately unsatisfying encounters with the philosophies those sources offered, but the moral commitment as well as the literary techniques of heir authors, particularly Jonathan Swift, inspired him. Dating Bierce's fiction, and introducing uncollected journalism, correspondence, and important new literary history and biographical information, Berkove brings new insights to a number of stories, including "A Son of the Gods" and "A Horseman in the Sky," but especially "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," and presents compelling readings of the Parenticide Club tales and "Moxon's Master." A Prescription for Adversity substantiates how Bierce at his best is one of the few American authors who rises to the level of Mark Twain, and the only one who touches Jonathan Swift.

A work of both biography and literary criticism, this book rescues Ambrose Bierce and his literature from the neglect to which it has been assigned by "ill-founded, obtuse and unproductive approaches based on skewed notions of his personality and forced or facile readings of individual stories."

Certificate of Commendation, American Association for State and Local History, 1994
T. R. Fehrenbach Book Award, Texas Historical Commission, 1992
San Antonio Conservation Society Citation, 1993

Dramatic historical events have frequently provided subject matter for artists, particularly in pre-twentieth-century Texas, where works portraying historical, often legendary, events and individuals predominated. Until now, however, these paintings of Texas history have never received the kind of study given to historical, fictional, and film versions of the same events. Painting Texas History to 1900 fills this gap with an interdisciplinary approach that explores these paintings both as works of art and as historical documents.

The author examines the works of more than forty artists, including Henry McArdle, Theodore Gentilz, Robert Onderdonk, William Huddle, Frederic Remington, Friedrich Richard Petri, Arthur T. Lee, Seth Eastman, Sarah Hardinge, Frank Reaugh, W. G. M. Samuel, Carl G. von Iwonski, and Julius Stockfleth. He places each work within its historical and cultural context to show why such subject matter was chosen, why it was depicted in a particular way, and why such a depiction gained popular acceptance. For example, paintings of heroic events of the Texas Revolution were especially popular in the years following the Civil War, when, in Ratcliffe's view, Texans needed such images to assuage the loss of the war and the humiliation of Reconstruction.

Though the paintings cut across traditional art history categories—from the pictographs of early historic Indians to European-inspired oil paintings—they are bound together by their artists' intent for them to function as historically evocative documents. With their visual narratives of events that characterized all of America's westward expansion—Indian encounters, military battles, farming, ranching, surveying, and the closing of the frontier—these works add an important chapter to the story of the American West.

The unique and powerful voice of an extraordinary nineteenth-century woman poet

Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt (1836-1919) now ranks as the strongest American woman poet of the nineteenth century after Emily Dickinson. Published heavily in all the period's most prestigious journals, Piatt was widely celebrated by her peers as a gifted stylist in the genteel tradition. This selected edition reveals Piatt's other side, a side that contemporary critics found more problematic: ironic, experimental, pushing the limits of Victorian language and the sentimental female persona.

Spanning more than half a century, this collection reveals the "borderland temper" of Piatt's mind and art. As an expatriate southerner, Piatt voices guilt at her own past as the daughter of slave-holders and raw anguish at the waste of war; as an eleven-year "exile" in Ireland, she expresses her dismay at the indifference of the wealthy to the daily suffering of the poor. Her poetry, whether speaking of children, motherhood, marriage, or illicit love affairs, uses conventional language and forms but in ways that greatly broadened the range of what women's poetry could say. Going beyond and even contradicting the genteel aesthetic, Piatt's poetry moves toward an innovative kind of dramatic realism built on dialogue, an approach more familiar to modern readers, acquainted with Faulknerian polyvocal texts, than to her contemporaries, who were as ill at ease with complexity as they were with irony. 

This astutely edited selection of Piatt's mature work--much of it never before collected--explains why her "deviant poetics" caused her peers such discomfort and why they offer such fertile ground for study today. Illustrated with engravings from Harper's Weekly and Harper's Bazaar, both periodicals in which Piatt's work appeared, Palace-Burner marks the reemergence of one of the most interesting writers in American literary history.

Tracing paranoia as a defining pattern of modern American literature. 

The recent popularity of The DaVinci Code and The Matrix trilogy exemplifies the fascination Americans have with conspiracy-driven subjects. Though scholars have suggested that in modern times the JFK assassination initiated an industry of conspiracy (i.e., Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, Area 51, Iran-Contra Affair), Samuel Chase Coale reminds us in this book that conspiracy is foundational in American culture—from the apocalyptic Biblical narratives in early Calvinist households to the fear of Mormon, Catholic, Jewish, and immigrant populations in the 19th century. 

Coale argues that contemporary culture—a landscape characterized by doubt, ambiguity, fragmentation, information overload, and mistrust—has fostered a radical skepticism so pervasive that the tendency to envision or construct conspiracies often provides the best explanation for the chaos that surrounds us.

Conspiracy as embodied in narrative form provides a fertile field for explorations of the anxiety lying at the heart of the postmodern experience. Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Don DeLillo's Underworld, Toni Morrison's Jazz and Paradise, Joan Didion's Democracy, Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods, and Paul Auster's New York City Trilogy are some of the texts Coale examines for their representations of isolated individuals at the center of massive, anonymous master plots that lay beyond their control. These narratives remind us that our historical sense of national identity has often been based on the demonizing of others and that American fiction arose and still flourishes with apocalyptic visions.

 

Rewriting Eden, Victoria Redel interrogates the idea of paradise within the historical context of borders, exile, and diaspora that brought us to the present global migration crisis. Drawing from a long family history of flight and refuge, the poems in Paradise interweave religion and myth, personal lore and nation-building, borders actual and imagined. They ask: What if what we fell from was never, actually, grace? What is a boundary, really? Redel navigates geopolitical perimeters while also questioning the border between the living and the dead and delineating the migrations aging women make in their bodies and lives. With stark lyricism and unflinching attention, Paradise considers how a legacy of trauma shapes imagination and asks readers to see the threads that tie contemporary catastrophes to the exigencies and flight paths that made us.

Rewriting Eden, Victoria Redel interrogates the idea of paradise within the historical context of borders, exile, and diaspora that brought us to the present global migration crisis. Drawing from a long family history of flight and refuge, the poems in Paradise interweave religion and myth, personal lore and nation-building, borders actual and imagined. They ask: What if what we fell from was never, actually, grace? What is a boundary, really? Redel navigates geopolitical perimeters while also questioning the border between the living and the dead and delineating the migrations aging women make in their bodies and lives. With stark lyricism and unflinching attention, Paradise considers how a legacy of trauma shapes imagination and asks readers to see the threads that tie contemporary catastrophes to the exigencies and flight paths that made us.

—a classic work from a West Virginia Poet Laureate!

With a new introduction by A.E. Stringer, this reprint of Louise McNeill's classic work remains as vivid as when it was first published. Containing poems from several decades of her career, Paradox Hill: From Appalachia to Lunar Shore is a must-have collection of a beloved poet's heartfelt exploration of her physical and cultural surroundings.

Playwright, biographer, screenwriter, and critic S. N. Behrman (1893–1973) characterized the years he spent writing for The New Yorker as a time defined by “feverish contact with great theatre stars, rich people and social people at posh hotels, at parties, in mansions and great estates.” While he hobnobbed with the likes of Mary McCarthy, Elia Kazan, and Greta Garbo and was one of Broadway's leading luminaries, Behrman would later admit that the friendships he built with the magazine's legendary editors Harold Ross, William Shawn, and Katharine S. White were the “one unalloyed felicity” of his life.

People in a Magazine collects Behrman's correspondence with his editors along with telegrams, interoffice memos, and editorial notes drawn from the magazine's archives—offering an unparalleled view of mid-twentieth-century literary life and the formative years of The New Yorker, from the time of Behrman's first contributions to the magazine in 1929 until his death.

A collection of primary source materials and original essays, Perspectives on American Book History is the first text designed for the growing number of courses in American print culture, as well as a unique supplement for courses in American literature and history. It seeks to fill the void that has developed as the expanding history of the book has moved out of the archive and scholarly journal and into the classroom. The volume includes an introductory essay by Robert A. Gross, chair of the program in the history of the book at the American Antiquarian Society, fourteen chapters composed of primary artifacts and original essays by rising scholars in the field, and an annotated bibliography of research sources. 

Chapters trace topics in American print culture from Puritan New England to the future of newspapers in a digital age. The artifacts and documents, most of which have never before been anthologized, include excerpts from readers' diaries, accounts of the printing and publishing trades, materials from the alternative press, commentaries on authorship and reading, and visual images. The essays place these primary source materials in their historical, literary, and political contexts and model the ways students might approach them. 

In addition to the editors and Robert A. Gross, the contributors are Nancy Cook, Patricia Crain, Ann Fabian, Alice Fahs, Ellen Gruber Garvey, Jen A. Huntley-Smith, Charles Johanningsmeier, Jill Lepore, Russell L. Martin, Trysh Travis, Glenn Wallach, and Susan S. Williams.

The first major monograph on Peter DeCamp Haines, this title explores how the sculptor's interest in psychology and anthropology deeply informed his art.

This book is the first major monograph on the work of Peter DeCamp Haines (March 27, 1942–October 25, 2024), which builds on the evolution of Modernism as much as it harkens back to the Bronze Age. The clearest expression of this is a series of 1,000 elemental bronze “artifacts” he created over the course of nearly fifty years, to which he contributed yearly, ranging from palm-size pieces to colossal outdoor works. He called this output “a personal archaeology,” or “an archaeology of the subconscious,” referencing ancient tools, animal and human shapes, and the synchronicity of antique forms with the purely abstract.

Haines’s interest in psychology and anthropology deeply informed his art. Working in a Modernist tradition, his career pursued a continuing exploration of the formal attributes of sculpture: form, scale, negative space, and composition. As Haines saw it, one of the satisfactions of sculpture is that ideas such as wholeness, beauty, and timelessness can be expressed without words and one of the critical elements of this wordless communication is negative space. Thus, the doorways, windows, and silhouettes of his sculptures can suggest an area larger than the sculpture itself.