Results by title

Henry David Thoreau spent his life as an intellectual vagrant, jumping fences, pushing boundaries, and crossing borders. How, why, and to what end are the questions asked by contributors to this new volume of essays, whose work crosses national and disciplinary borders to think about Thoreau anew.

Deliberately invoking Thoreau's commitment to “living a border life,” a life located between the world of nature and that of the polis, these varied essays explore the writer's thinking and writing as situated not merely against, but across and beyond borders and boundaries—whether geographic, temporal, or spiritual. Arguing that literary texts are governed by mediation and dialogue, lines of force becoming lines of connection that entail complex patterns and interweavings, the contributors draw on methodologies that freely combine literary and philosophical approaches with cultural and political ones—in turn moving us beyond borders.

Contributors include the volume editors as well as Kristen Case, Danielle Follett, Rochelle Johnson, John J. Kucich, Daniel S. Malachuk, Henrik Otterberg, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, Benjamin Pickford, David M. Robinson, Christa Holm Vogelius, and Michael C. Weisenburg.

Examining journal drawings as an integral—and often delightful—feature of Thoreau’s work 

In 1850, Henry David Thoreau began to draw in his Journal—a hedgehog’s quill, a locust’s wing, a goldenrod leaf. The sketches reflect his efforts to train his eye to observe more carefully, to look closely enough that he could see what was in front of him—with intention and attention. As Thoreau worked to combine the vivid language of a writer with the precision of a scientist, his drawings became more vital to the process. For him, writing and drawing were not separate activities; they were part of the same active, hands-on process of learning about the natural world. 

Thoreau’s Journal Drawings offers a sustained examination of an understudied aspect of the Journal, emphasizing visual as well as textual analysis. It places Thoreau’s illustrated entries in the broader context of nineteenth-century scientific illustration, nature writing, and visual culture, while also offering close readings of key passages in which text and image work in tandem.  The book opens up new possibilities for interpretation—both within the Journal and in the larger project of Thoreau’s thinking. 

Ultimately, Thoreau’s illustrated Journal offers a case study in the complexities of representing the natural world through both language and image. His practice raises enduring questions about how we document, interpret, and mediate the more-than-human world across different forms of expression. To read the later volumes of Henry David Thoreau’s Journal without attending to his drawings is to overlook a vital dimension of his practice as both writer and observer. 

As a philosophical and social concept, alienation covers a broad range of mental states, both normal and abnormal. Correspondingly, a wide range of literary forms has been employed to deal with this important theme. In Three Authors of Alienation, an exploration of the literary expression of alienation, M. Ian Adams discusses the works of three contemporary Latin American authors.

The fiction of María Luisa Bombal, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Alejo Carpentier reflects alienation, disgust with life, and a feeling of nothingness arising from the conditions of modern society. However, each author treats the theme differently. In La última niebla, María Luisa Bombal uses poetic imagery to create the emotional life of the protagonist. Juan Carlos Onetti portrays the schizoid extreme of alienation with a complex of symbols based on changes of vision caused by the mental states of his characters. In Los pasos perdidos, Alejo Carpentier presents the problem of the modern alienated artist who attempts to rid himself of his social alienation by changing times and cultures.

In his close analysis of the works discussed, Adams considers each literary element in its context and also in terms of its relation to the larger artistic vision of the author. In addition, he places the works of the three authors in the greater perspective of modern social problems by discussing the concepts of social alienation proposed by Erich Fromm and Erich Kahler. His conclusion is that, although disgust with life and feelings of meaninglessness are at the heart of the experiences of the characters of all three authors, only in Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos are social conditions the major cause of alienation. In the works of Bombal and Onetti, alienation is a result not of social conditions, but of factors unique to the characters’ personalities and circumstances.

Three Authors of Alienation is a solid contribution to criticism of contemporary Latin American narrative. Adams’s projection of a social problem into the realm of aesthetic experience yields intriguing interpretations of both the problem and the literature.

Unlocking the imagination, language, and vision that shaped C. S. Lewis's enduring legacy.

Through the Open Door: A New Look at C. S. Lewis offers a fresh and illuminating examination of one of the twentieth century's most beloved writers, scholars, and Christian thinkers. In this insightful study, Dabney Adams Hart moves beyond familiar assessments of C. S. Lewis as the creator of The Chronicles of Narnia to explore the intellectual foundations that shaped his work as a literary critic, educator, and defender of the Christian faith. Drawing on Lewis's essays, criticism, fiction, and apologetic writings, Hart reveals the central importance of imagination, language, myth, and meaning in Lewis's understanding of literature and human experience.

Rather than treating Lewis's diverse writings as separate endeavors, Hart demonstrates how they reflect a coherent and unified vision of truth, beauty, and morality. The book shows how Lewis used story and symbolism to address enduring questions about faith, reason, and the search for purpose in a modern world. Accessible to general readers while engaging for scholars, this volume provides valuable insight into the ideas that continue to make Lewis a significant figure in literary and religious studies. An important contribution to Lewis scholarship, Through the Open Door invites readers to discover anew the imagination and intellect behind one of the most influential Christian authors of the modern era.

This informative and provocative study focuses on the centrality of departure in the texts of five major American women novelists.

An important moment in many novels and poems by American women writers occurs when a central character looks out a window or walks out the door of a house. These acts of departure serve to convey such values as the rejection of constraining social patterns, the search for individual fulfillment, and the entry into the political.

Janis Stout examines such moments and related patterns of venture and travel in the fiction of five major American novelists of the 20th century: Mary Austin, Willa Cather, Anne Tyler, Toni Morrison, and Joan Didion. Stout views these five writers within a spectrum of narrative engagements with issues of home and departure—a spectrum anchored at one end by Sarah Orne Jewett and at the other by Marilynne Robinson, whose Housekeeping posits a vision of female transience.

Through the Window, Out the Door ranges over an expansive territory. Moving between texts as well as between texts and contexts, Stout shows how women writers have envisioned the walls of physical and social structures (including genres) as permeable boundaries, drawing on both a rhetoric of liberation and a rhetoric of domesticity to construct narrative arguments for women's right to move freely between the two. Stout concludes with a personal essay on the dilemmas of domesticity and the ambivalence of departure.

Drawing on decades of research and interviews with Wright’s family and Wright scholars, Bruce Allen Dick uncovers the theatrical influence on Wright’s oeuvre--from his 1930s boxing journalism to his unpublished one-acts on returning Black GIs in WWII to his unproduced pageant honoring Vladimir Lenin. Wright maintained rewarding associations with playwrights, writers, and actors such as Langston Hughes, Theodore Ward, Paul Robeson, and Lillian Hellman, and took particular inspiration from French literary figures like Jean-Paul Sartre. Dick’s analysis also illuminates Wright’s direct involvement with theater and film, including the performative aspects of his travel writings; the Orson Welles-directed Native Son on Broadway; his acting debut in Native Son’s first film version; and his play “Daddy Goodness,” a satire of religious charlatans like Father Divine, in the 1930s.

Bold and original, Thunder on the Stage offers a groundbreaking reinterpretation of a major American writer.

Focusing on literary and popular poets, as well as work by women, African Americans, and soldiers, this book considers how writers used poetry to articulate their relationships to family, community, and nation during the Civil War. Faith Barrett suggests that the nationalist “we” and the personal “I” are not opposed in this era; rather they are related positions on a continuous spectrum of potential stances. For example, while Julia Ward Howe became famous for her “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” in an earlier poem titled “The Lyric I” she struggles to negotiate her relationship to domestic, aesthetic, and political stances.

Barrett makes the case that Americans on both sides of the struggle believed that poetry had an important role to play in defining national identity. She considers how poets created a platform from which they could speak both to their own families and local communities and to the nations of the Confederacy, the Union, and the United States. She argues that the Civil War changed the way American poets addressed their audiences and that Civil War poetry changed the way Americans understood their relationship to the nation.

To Go Into the Words is the latest book of critical prose from renowned poet and scholar of Jewish literature Norman Finkelstein. Through a rigorous examination of poets such as William Bronk, Helen Adam, and Nathaniel Mackey, the book engages the contemporary poetic fascination with transcendence through the radical delight with language. By opening up a given poem, Finkelstein seeks the “gnosis” or insight of what it contains so that other readers can understand and appreciate the works even more.

How did racial prejudice originate and why has it been so deeply rooted in American culture? What have been the long-term effects of prejudice on the intellectual, communal, and psychological resources of African Americans? How might the nightmare of racial domination be truly brought to an end? Still pertinent today, these were among the key questions addressed more than a century and a half ago by Hosea Easton (1799–1837), an important yet long neglected activist and intellectual. 

A black minister from New England, Easton rose to prominence during the 1820s and 1830s by joining in the struggle of free African Americans to resist southern slavery and secure racial equality. From this experience he developed a deep understanding of the problem of "race" in the United States and became a trenchant critic of white supremacy and its devastating consequences. This volume brings back into print the only extended writings of Easton that have survived into our time: his insightful, almost prescient A Treatise on the Intellectual Character, and the Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the U. States, first published in 1837; and his passionate 1828 Thanksgiving Day “Address.” The book also provides a biographical portrait of Easton and his family, drawn from primary documents as well as secondary sources in the areas of biography, genealogy, and social history.

Many writers, from Aristophanes to Joseph Heller, have written about politics. But at certain periods in history, often at times of conflict and turmoil, writers have consciously used their literary talents to support or oppose a specific cause. The 1930s, a decade of widespread social and political breakdown, was such a period.

Today the Struggle examines the political involvement of those leading British writers who dedicated their talents to the defense of Nationalists or Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War and who saw that war as symbolic of their own Right-Left dialogue.

Conservatives like William Butler Yeats and T. S. Eliot and Roman Catholics like Evelyn Waugh were passionately anti-Communist. They viewed fascism as a bulwark against communism but were unwilling to support the Franco cause actively. Other pro-Nationalists were not so hesitant: Roy Campbell and Wyndham Lewis were ardent participants in the fight against the British left wing.

Pro-Loyalists, united only in their antifascism, ranged from conservative to anarchist in political commitment. Their literary contributions included fine poems by W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, experimental drama by Auden and Christopher Isherwood, and impassioned prose by Rex Warner, George Orwell, and Aldous Huxley.

Katharine Hoskins’s principal interest in Today the Struggle is to discover how and why certain writers supported specific political actions, to ascertain the effectiveness of their efforts, and to evaluate the influence of these efforts on their work.

Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review presents the growing body of critical commentary and scholarship on both J. R. R. Tolkien’s voluminous fiction and his academic work in literary and linguistic fields.