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This book reconsiders realism on the American stage by addressing the great variety and richness of the plays that form the American theatre canon.

Any review of 20th-century American theatre invariably leads to the term realism. Yet despite the strong tradition of theatrical realism on the American stage, the term is frequently misidentified, and the practices to which it refers are often attacked as monolithically tyrannical, restricting the potential of the American national theatre.This book reconsiders realism on the American stage by addressing the great variety and richness of the plays that form the American theatre canon. By reconsidering the form and revisiting many of the plays that contributed to the realist tradition, the authors provide the opportunity to apprise strengths often overlooked by previous critics. The volume traces the development of American dramatic realism from James A. Herne, the "American Ibsen," to currently active contemporaries such as Sam Shepard, David Mamet, and Marsha Norman. This frank assessment, in sixteen original essays, reopens a critical dialog too long closed.

Essays include:

American Dramatic Realisms, Viable Frames of Thought

The Struggle for the Real--Interpretive Conflict, Dramatic Method, and the Paradox of Realism

The Legacy of James A. Herne: American Realities and Realisms

Whose Realism? Rachel Crothers's Power Struggle in the American Theatre

The Provincetown Players' Experiments with Realism

Servant of Three Masters: Realism, Idealism, and "Hokum" in American High Comedy

    Readers often have regarded with curiosity the creative life of the poet. In this passionate and authoritative new study, David Bethea illustrates the relation between the art and life of nineteenth-century poet Alexander Pushkin, the central figure in Russian thought and culture. Bethea shows how Pushkin, on the eve of his two-hundredth birthday, still speaks to our time. He indicates how we as modern readers might "realize"— that is, not only grasp cognitively, but feel, experience—the promethean metaphors central to the poet's intensely "sculpted" life. The Pushkin who emerges from Bethea's portrait is one who, long unknown to English-language readers, closely resembles the original both psychologically and artistically.
    Bethea begins by addressing the influential thinkers Freud, Bloom, Jakobson, and Lotman to show that their premises do not, by themselves, adequately account for Pushkin's psychology of creation or his version of the "life of the poet." He then proposes his own versatile model of reading, and goes on to sketches the tangled connections between Pushkin and his great compatriot, the eighteenth-century poet Gavrila Derzhavin. Pushkin simultaneously advanced toward and retreated from the shadow of his predecessor as he created notions of poet-in-history and inspiration new for his time and absolutely determinative for the tradition thereafter.

Long ago dubbed the “Paradise of America,” Northampton, Massachusetts, is also known as the home of visionaries—from the Reverend Jonathan Edwards, father of the First Great Awakening, to George W. Benson, brother-in-law of William Lloyd Garrison and a founder of the utopian Northampton Association for Education and Industry. During the mid-nineteenth century the town became a center of political abolitionism and a hub in the Underground Railroad. In this book, Bruce Laurie profiles five rebellious figures who launched Northampton's abolitionist movement—Sylvester Judd Jr., John Payson Williston, David Ruggles, Henry Sherwood Gere, and Erastus Hopkins. Through their individual stories he traces the evolution of the antislavery movement in western Massachusetts and links it to broader developments in economics, civil life, and political affairs. 

Northampton's abolitionists were a heterodox group, yet most were intrepid devotees of democracy and racial equality, idealists who enjoyed genuine friendships and political alliances with African Americans. Several even took the bold step of hiring African Americans in their businesses. They avoided the doctrinal rivalries that sometimes troubled the antislavery movement in other places, skillfully steering clear of the xenophobic nativism that infected Massachusetts politics in the mid–1850s and divided the Republican Party at large. Although a prohibitionist faction disrupted the Northampton abolitionist movement for a time, the leaders prevailed on the strength of their personal prestige and political experience, making the seat of Hampshire County what one of them called an abolitionist “stronghold.”

Covering nearly two centuries of cultural production, this compelling collection brings together critical readings from the genesis of Afro-Brazilian literary studies alongside some of Brazil’s most vital contemporary voices. From nineteenth-century pioneer Maria Firmina dos Reis to the boundary-breaking trans performer Linn da Quebrada, the contributions to this book trace a powerful lineage of Black intellectual, artistic, and political expression.

The authors engage urgently with questions of identity and the enduring realities of racism in Brazilian society, while confronting why race remains both central and controversial in Brazil’s cultural imagination. The contributors illuminate how Afro-Brazilian writers, artists, and thinkers have continually forged spaces to create, theorize, and assert their own subjectivities—challenging erasure and reclaiming Black agency. By mapping this expansive tradition across literature, music, and cultural thought, this book reveals not only the richness of Afro-Brazilian creativity, but also why Brazil still struggles to fully embrace its Blackness. Both historically grounded and sharply contemporary, it is an essential exploration of race, culture, and resistance in Brazil that will speak to scholars not just of Brazil but also of Latin America and the African diaspora.

Showing how twenty-first-century Black theater and media arts challenge dominant conceptualizations of time

Reclaiming Time: Race, Temporality, and Black Expressive Culture examines works by contemporary Black artists in multiple media—drama, film, performance art, and photography—that trouble dominant conceptualizations and normative configurations of time in relation to race in the twenty-first century. Isaiah Matthew Wooden explores the ways in which an intentional and sometimes ludic engagement with time and temporality has enabled these artists to probe urgent questions and themes concerning the conditions of contemporary Black life.

Wooden surveys a diverse array of performance-based and visual texts to explore the rich practices of contemporary Black expressive culture: dramatic works by playwrights Eisa Davis, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and Robert O’Hara; performance art and photography by visual artists Jefferson Pinder and LaToya Ruby Frazier; and feature-length cinema by director-producer Tanya Hamilton. These works expose normative time as specious and evidence the transformative potential in honing practices of Black temporal experimentation and intervention. By putting this cross-disciplinary set of texts in conversation with each other, Wooden sheds new light on the shrewd ways that they each reflect an investment in unbinding time from the exigencies of normativity and teleology, as well as on their shared commitments to reclaiming time to reimagine and represent Blackness in all its multiplicities.

Reveals how literary scenes of recognition stage the process of coming to know reality

In this deeply researched and thought-provoking study, Jessica C. Resvick traces nineteenth-century German realist writing’s paradoxical investment in mediated accounts of the world and the direct, unfiltered experience of reality. Focusing on the motif and operation of recognition in its Aristotelean sense, Resvick examines self-reflexive narratives in which the authors struggle to resolve this tension between the media they choose and the immediacy they hope to create. 

Through close readings of key works by canonical authors such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Adalbert Stifter, Gottfried Keller, and Wilhelm Raabe, Resvick demonstrates the medially influenced and historically contingent ways in which they represent reality. Each chapter focuses on a different form of recognition, reconstructing the techniques that allow these authors to generate an effect of presence. Exploring the history and poetics of knowledge exchange, Recognizing Reality: German Realism and the Mediation of Presence expands on recent media histories of realism, examining the material bases for realist aesthetics while also investigating media’s epistemological accomplishments, and astutely elaborates the role of recognition as a medium-specific tool.

A selection of essays revealing the singular brilliance of Ferguson’s critical writing over four decades.

Ranging across literature, philosophy, and social thought, Frances Ferguson asks how forms—whether aesthetic, legal, or bureaucratic—help to assign value and thereby organize our relations as well as our personal identities. Ferguson is a literary critic who takes her lead, unexpectedly, from Jeremy Bentham, showing how modernity tracks and makes perceptible the values of a host of human activities—the knowledge that comes from early learning exercises, the specialized knowledge that funds particular professions, and the exacting if unspecialized knowledge of the social world of courtship or hanging out.

Gathering Ferguson’s most influential and still timely essays, Records of Reward includes, among others, “The Nuclear Sublime,” in which Ferguson turns to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to examine how the aesthetic logic of the sublime obscures the claims of domesticity and the beautiful; “Rape and the Rise of the Novel,” which examines the history of rape law to highlight the importance of Samuel Richardson’s foregrounding of consent in Clarissa; “Pornography, the Theory,” where she explores the threshold between speech and action to identify environments—such as schools and workplaces—in which pornographic expression can be harmfully potentiated; and “Jane Austen, Emma, and the Impact of Form,” in which she analyzes Austen’s use of free indirect style to depict both her protagonist and her reader engaged in acts of “over-knowing” others in everyday life. Most unexpectedly, perhaps, the collection also includes an essay analyzing Bitcoin as a small language model that exerts enormous affective pressure on its partisans.

A vivid demonstration of the enduring rewards of theory and close reading alike, Records of Reward will be essential reading across the fields of literary studies, cultural studies, and political thought.

A groundbreaking rethinking of epic tradition through recursive literary analysis.

Epic has often been seen as a dead genre, intrinsically patriarchal and nationalistic. Furthermore, the psychological model most frequently applied to the relations between poets has been a violent one--the Freudian masterplot of Oedipus slaying the father to possess the mother. The limited usefulness of such simplistic explanations of epic is readily apparent when confronted with the continuing production of epic poetry long after its so-called death; when confronted with the contemporary drive toward epic among women poets, people of color, and postcolonial poets; and when faced with epic's fundamentally recursive desire--obvious in oral epic, but common to the entire genre--to repeat rather than to kill or evade its precursors.

Recursive desire, rooted in more basic preoedipal negotiations of union and separation rather than in Oedipal conflict, provides an elegant and far more useful explanation. By rereading and substantially redefining epic in this way, this book recognizes and reinvests with meaning the vital recursive qualities of the genre. Examining a diverse array of texts from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Derek Walcott's Osmeros, from the Homeric epics to H.D.'s Helen in Egypt. The book develops a broadened, inclusive, and living tradition of epic poetry, demonstrating the continuities of that tradition across dramatic discontinuities in time, place, worldview, and technology.

Recursive Desire rereads epic tradition and specific epic poems in ways that challenge traditional notions of the genre and open up unexplored fields of endeavor to students of epic, of poetry, and of narrative. With its more powerful and comprehensive psychological model of poetic relations, the book provides readers with a new understanding of epic poetry and its vital, shifting, polyvocal array (and disarray) of textual forces.

In Red Business, Walt Whitman readers can explore nearly all his notebooks and manuscript fragments from the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era. In addition to Whitman’s numerous accounts of Civil War soldiers, Red Business contains the infamous notebook in which Whitman records his feverish obsession with his young companion Peter Doyle, as well as several difficult to find, unpublished poems and essays.

Matt Miller and Zachary Turpin’s meticulous transcriptions of Whitman’s written materials allow readers to explore the often-neglected final chapter of Whitman’s life, as he battled ailments, prepared speeches, and received famous visitors, all the while continuing to write revealing new poems.

An entertaining and enlightening proposal for a new way to read Native American literature.

An entertaining and enlightening proposal for a new way to read Native American literature.

Between 1890 and 1924, more than two million Jewish immigrants landed on America's shores. The story of their integration into American society, as they traversed the difficult path between assimilation and retention of a unique cultural identity, is recorded in many works by American Hebrew writers. Red, Black, and Jew illuminates a unique and often overlooked aspect of these literary achievements, charting the ways in which the Native American and African American creative cultures served as a model for works produced within the minority Jewish community.

Exploring the paradox of Hebrew literature in the United States, in which separateness, and engagement and acculturation, are equally strong impulses, Stephen Katz presents voluminous examples of a process that could ultimately be considered Americanization. Key components of this process, Katz argues, were poems and works of prose fiction written in a way that evoked Native American forms or African American folk songs and hymns. Such Hebrew writings presented America as a unified society that could assimilate all foreign cultures. At no other time in the history of Jews in diaspora have Hebrew writers considered the fate of other minorities to such a degree. Katz also explores the impact of the creation of the state of Israel on this process, a transformation that led to ambivalence in American Hebrew literature as writers were given a choice between two worlds.

Reexamining long-neglected writers across a wide spectrum, Red, Black, and Jew celebrates an important chapter in the history of Hebrew belles lettres.

2025 Best Single Author Book, Midwest Popular Culture Association
2025 Longlist, Reading the West Book Award in Nonfiction, Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association

A history of American Western genre comics and how they interacted with contemporaneous political and popular culture.

Redrawing the Western charts a history of the Western genre in American comics from the late 1800s through the 1970s and beyond. Encompassing the core years in which the genre was forged and prospered in a range of popular media, Grady engages with several key historical timeframes, from the origins of the Western in the nineteenth-century illustrated press; through fin de siècle anxieties with the closing of the frontier, and the centrality of cowboy adventure across the interwar, postwar, and high Cold War years; to the revisions of the genre in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Western’s continued vitality in contemporary comics storytelling.

In its study of stories about vengeance, conquest, and justice on the contested frontier, Redrawing the Western highlights how the “simplistic” conflicts common in Western adventure comics could disguise highly political undercurrents, providing young readers with new ways to think about the contemporaneous social and political milieu. Besides tracing the history, forms, and politics of American Western comics in and around the twentieth century, William Grady offers an original reassessment of the important role of comics in the development of the Western genre, ranking them alongside popular fiction and film in the process.