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The working classes, colonial subjects, European nationalists, and Roman Catholics—these groups generated intense anxiety for Victorian England’s elite public, which often responded by accusing them of being dangerous conspirators. Bringing together a wide range of literary and historical evidence, Albert D. Pionke argues that the pejorative meanings attached to such opportunistic accusations of conspiracy were undermined by the many valorized versions of secrecy in Victorian society.

After surveying England’s evolving theories of representative politics and individual and collective secretive practices, Pionke traces the intersection of democracy and secrecy through a series of case histories. Using works by Thomas Carlyle, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, John Henry Newman, and others, along with periodicals, histories, and parliamentary documents of the period, he shows the rhetorical prominence of groups such as the Freemasons, the Thugs, the Carbonari, the Fenians, and the Jesuits in Victorian democratic discourse.

By highlighting the centrality of representations of conspiracy in every case, Plots of Opportunity shows for the first time the markedly similar strategies of repression, resistance, and concealment used by competing agents in the democracy debate.

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."

Reimagining Oceania through the travel narratives that shaped the meaning of authenticity.

In Pacific Possessions: The Pursuit of Authenticity in Nineteenth-Century Oceanian Travel Accounts, Chris J. Thomas expands the literary canon on Polynesia and Melanesia beyond the giants, such as Herman Melville and Jack London, to include travel narratives by British and American visitors. These accounts were widely read and reviewed when they first appeared but have largely been ignored by scholars. For the first time, Thomas defines these writings as a significant literary genre.

Recovering these works allows us to reconceive of nineteenth-century Oceania as a vibrant hub of cultural interchange. Pacific Possessions recaptures the polyphony of voices that enlivened this space through the writing of these travelers, while also paying attention to their Oceanian interlocutors. Each chapter centers on a Pacific cultural marker, what Thomas refers to as each writer’s “possession”: the Tongan tattoo, the Hawaiian hula, the Fijian cannibal fork, and  Robert Louis Stevenson’s cache of South Seas photographs.

Thomas analyzes how westerners formed narratives around these objects and what those objects meant within nineteenth-century Oceanian cultures. He argues that the accounts served to shape a version of Oceanian authenticity that persists today. The profiled traveler-writers had complex experiences, at times promoting exoticized exaggerations of so-called authentic Polynesian and Melanesian cultures and at other times genuinely engaging in cultural exchange. However, their views were ultimately compromised by a western lens. In Thomas’s words, “the authenticity is at once celebrated and written over.”

At last, for those who adapt literature into scripts, a how-to book that illuminates the process of creating a stageworthy play. Page to Stage describes the essential steps for constructing adaptations for any theatrical venue, from the college classroom to a professionally produced production. Acclaimed director Vincent Murphy offers students in theater, literary studies, and creative writing a clear and easy-to-use guidebook on adaptation. Its step-by-step process will be valuable to professional theater artists as well, and for script writers in any medium. Murphy defines six essential building blocks and strategies for a successful adaptation, including theme, dialogue, character, imagery, storyline, and action. Exercises at the end of each chapter lead readers through the transformation process, from choosing their material to creating their own adaptations. The book provides case studies of successful adaptations, including The Grapes of Wrath (adaptation by Frank Galati) and the author's own adaptations of stories by Samuel Beckett and John Barth. Also included is practical information on building collaborative relationships, acquiring rights, and getting your adaptation produced.

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.

 

Unraveling the hidden influence of the paranormal on science, literature, and belief
 

Telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and telekinesis: these attributes of the paranormal mind are widely dismissed as nonsense, but what can an exploration of such pseudoscientific phenomena tell us about accepted scientific and cultural thought? In Parascientific Revolutions, Derek Lee traces the evolution of psi epistemologies across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to uncover how these ideas have migrated into scientific fields such as quantum physics and neurology, as well as diverse literary genres including science fiction, ethnic literature, and even government training manuals.

Lee introduces the groundbreaking concept of “parascience,” a dynamic cultural space where ideas rejected by the scientific establishment blend with alternative strains of literary, mythic, and philosophical thought to regenerate and return to mainstream discourse. From early modernist works by James Joyce to postwar speculative fiction by Philip K. Dick to ethnofuturist narratives by Ruth Ozeki, Parascientific Revolutions demonstrates how cultural and intellectual currents reshape paranormal ideas over time. Examining psychic surveillance programs like Project Stargate and bizarre particles of extrasensory perception such as the psitron, Lee illustrates the ways paranormal concepts persist and evolve to influence culture.

Presenting pseudoscience as an inevitable by-product of the scientific process, Parascientific Revolutions offers fresh insight into how the paranormal mind continually challenges our understanding of knowledge and belief. It invites readers to reconsider the boundaries between science and the unknown, revealing a world where speculative thought and empirical investigation are deeply intertwined.

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The untold story of how the Chicago Symphony Orchestra forged its place among the world’s foremost performing arts institutions through 135 years of change.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra boasts a tradition and staying power that few cultural institutions can rival—a legacy that is tested each time one music director passes the conductor’s baton to another. In this first narrative account of the orchestra’s 135-year history, music critic and historian Phillip Huscher delivers a passionate description of how an upstart ensemble rose to international prominence and established itself as the premier symphony orchestra in the United States. 

With a scholar’s care for detail and a novelist’s attention to drama, Huscher invites us into the tangled machinations behind the success or failure of each chapter in the orchestra’s storied past. We see how legendary directors such as Fritz Reiner, Sir Georg Solti, and Riccardo Muti carried the orchestra to new heights of technical perfection and sonic brilliance, but also how others provoked public outcry, caved to insider hostility, or fell to cruel press. The result is a vivid portrait of an orchestra fighting to sustain its identity amid the constant contest between past and present, supporters and critics, and artistic and financial vision.

Woven into this saga are personal stories drawn from newly uncovered documents and interviews with players, conductors, and policymakers about the burden of inheritance, the price of ambition, and the yearning to forge a legacy. Taken together, this is a tale about the power of music—how it can help us navigate our lives and leave a lasting impact on the world around us.

A collection of essays that offers an intimate view of Larry McMurtry, America’s preeminent western novelist, through the eyes of a pantheon of writers he helped shape through his work over the course of his unparalleled literary life.

When he died in 2021, Larry McMurtry was one of America’s most revered writers. The author of treasured novels such as Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show, and coauthor of the screenplays for Brokeback Mountain and Streets of Laredo, McMurtry created unforgettable characters and landscapes largely drawn from his life growing up on the family’s hardscrabble ranch outside his hometown of Archer City, Texas. Pastures of the Empty Page brings together fellow writers to honor the man and his impact on American letters.

Paulette Jiles, Stephen Harrigan, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, and Lawrence Wright take up McMurtry’s piercing and poetic vision—an elegiac literature of place that demolished old myths of cowboy culture and created new ones. Screenwriting partner Diana Ossana reflects on their thirty-year book and screenwriting partnership; other contributors explore McMurtry’s reading habits and his passion for bookselling. And brother Charlie McMurtry shares memories of their childhood on the ranch. In contrast to his curmudgeonly persona, Larry McMurtry emerges as a trustworthy friend and supportive mentor. McMurtry was famously self-deprecating, but as his admirers attest, this self-described “minor regional writer” was an artist for the ages.

In September of 1963, Reverend Lawrence Roberts and the Angelic Choir of the First Baptist Church of Nutley, New Jersey, teamed with rising gospel star James Cleveland to record Peace Be Still. The LP and its haunting title track became a phenomenon. Robert M. Marovich draws on extensive oral interviews and archival research to chart the history of Peace Be Still and the people who created it. Emerging from an established gospel music milieu, Peace Be Still spent several years as the bestselling gospel album of all time. As such, it forged a template for live recordings of services that transformed the gospel music business and Black worship. Marovich also delves into the music's connection to fans and churchgoers, its enormous popularity then and now, and the influence of the Civil Rights Movement on the music's message and reception.

The first in-depth history of a foundational recording, Peace Be Still shines a spotlight on the people and times that created a gospel music touchstone.