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The Law of the Heart is a vigorous challenge to the prevailing concept of the “antidemocratic” image of the self in the American literary and cultural tradition. Sam B. Girgus counters this interpretation and attempts to develop a new understanding of democratic individualism and liberal humanism in American literature under the rubric of literary modernism.

The image of the individual self who retreats inward, conforming to a distorted “law of the heart,” emerges from the works of such writers as Cooper and Poe and composer Charles Ives. Yet, as Girgus shows, other American writers relate the idea of the self to reality and culture in a more complex way: the self confronts and is reconciled to the paradox of history and reality.

In Girgus’ view, the tradition of pragmatic, humanistic individualism provides a foundation for a future where individual liberty is a major priority. He uses literary modernism as a bridge for relating contemporary social conditions to crises of the American self and culture as seen in the works of writers including Emerson, Howells, Whitman, Henry James, William James, Fitzgerald, Bellow, and McLuhan.

 Considered by many to be the greatest writer of his generation, David Foster Wallace was at the height of his creative powers when he committed suicide in 2008. In a sweeping portrait of Wallace’s writing and thought and as a measure of his importance in literary history, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace gathers cutting-edge, field-defining scholarship by critics alongside remembrances by many of his writer friends, who include some of the world’s most influential authors.

A play from the inimitable Kate Hamill, based on the true story of the groundbreaking Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi

During the seventeenth century, Italian artists strove to reshape the very image of humanity. Artemisia Gentileschi—the daughter of a painter—dreams of making her mark at a time when a woman is not thought capable of being an artist, let alone one of the greats. Just as her career begins to gain unexpected momentum, a series of devastating betrayals crack the foundation of her work—and her life. In electrifying verse and gorgeous artwork, The Light and The Dark depicts the deeply moving true story of a young woman who changed the very image of women in society . . . weaving a magnetic and empowering tapestry of ambition, rage, and resilience across the ages.

All of American author Frank Norris’s significant critical writings have been compiled in this book, including his articles for the San Francisco Wave during 1896–1897 and selections from his “Weekly Letter” column for the Chicago American in 1901. Essays from these two previously unexploited sources, comprising almost half the book, reveal certain areas of Norris’s thought which heretofore had been overlooked by scholars.

This book was compiled in order to clarify Frank Norris’s literary creed. When Donald Pizer began to read Norris’s uncollected critical articles, he observed concepts which had been unnoted or misunderstood by his critics. Crediting this to the inadequate representation of Norris’s ideas in the posthumous The Responsibilities of the Novelist (1903), Pizer recognized the need for an interpretive and complete edition of Norris’s critical writings. This volume thus fills a noticeable gap in the field of American literary criticism.

By the time of his death in 1902 Norris had a closed system of critical ideas. This core of ideas, however, is only peripherally related to the conventional concept of literary naturalism, which perhaps explains why critics have gone astray trying to find Zolaesque ideas in Norris’s criticism. Norris’s central idea, around which he built an aesthetic of the novel, was that the best novel combines an intensely primitivistic subject matter and theme with a highly sophisticated form. His paradox of sophisticated primitivism clarifies the vital link between the fiction produced in the 1890s and that written by Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck.

Norris’s essays deal with many of the literary themes which preoccupy modern critical theorists. His range of subjects includes the form and function of the novel; definitions of naturalism, realism, and romanticism; and the problem of what constitutes an American novel. His interpretation of commonplace events, his comments on prominent figures of his day, and his parodies of writers such as Bret Harte, Stephen Crane, and Rudyard Kipling are characterized by ingenuity and perception. Through these writings the personality of a man with well-defined convictions and the ability to expound them provocatively comes into sharp focus.

In a general introduction Pizer summarizes Norris’s critical position and surveys his career as literary critic. This introduction and the interpretative introductions preceding each section constitute an illuminating essay on the literary temper of the period and provide a new insight into Norris’ craft and his literary philosophy.

The literary archive of the U.S.-Mexican War (1846–1848) opens to view the conflicts and relationships across one of the most contested borders in the Americas. Most studies of this literature focus on the war's nineteenth-century moment of national expansion. In The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War, Jaime Javier Rodríguez brings the discussion forward to our own moment by charting a new path into the legacies of a military conflict embedded in the cultural cores of both nations.

Rodríguez's groundbreaking study moves beyond the terms of Manifest Destiny to ask a fundamental question: How do the war's literary expressions shape contemporary tensions and exchanges among Anglo Americans, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans. By probing the war's traumas, anxieties, and consequences with a fresh attention to narrative, Rodríguez shows us the relevance of the U.S.-Mexican War to our own era of demographic and cultural change. Reading across dime novels, frontline battle accounts, Mexican American writings and a wide range of other popular discourse about the war, Rodríguez reveals how historical awareness itself lies at the center of contemporary cultural fears of a Mexican "invasion," and how the displacements caused by the war set key terms for the ways Mexican Americans in subsequent generations would come to understand their own identities. Further, this is also the first major comparative study that analyzes key Mexican war texts and their impact on Mexico's national identity.

A poetic journey through five decades of wonder, memory, and love, where the ordinary becomes sacred and every line leads home

Spanning five decades of poetic mastery, The Lost Book of Life: New and Selected Poems is the definitive collection from Charles Ghigna, a beloved and influential voice in contemporary Southern poetry. Drawing from fourteen previous volumes and featuring thirty-seven new poems, this landmark collection captures the full arc of Ghigna’s creative evolution, from his early meditations on nature and family to his later reflections on memory, mortality, and the enduring power of love.

With graceful shifts between free verse and traditional forms, Ghigna’s voice is both intimate and expansive—clear as spring water, alive with wit, and steeped in feeling. His poems open doorways into childhood’s bright dreaming, the quiet complexities of fatherhood, and the sacred hush of daily life. Ghigna invites readers to see the world anew, to find beauty in the familiar, and to embrace the sacred in the ordinary. For longtime admirers and new readers alike, The Lost Book of Life is a luminous testament to a life devoted to poetry. It is both compass and keepsake: a celebration of poetry’s enduring light, and a lasting gift to the literature of the American South.

In the early nineteenth century, Lowell, Massachusetts, was widely studied and emulated as a model for capitalist industrial development. One of the first cities in the United States to experience the ravages of deindustrialization, it was also among the first places in the world to turn to its own industrial and ethnic history as a tool for reinventing itself in the emerging postindustrial economy. The Lowell Experiment explores how history and culture have been used to remake Lowell and how historians have played a crucial yet ambiguous role in that process.

The book focuses on Lowell National Historical Park, the flagship project of Lowell's new cultural economy. When it was created in 1978, the park broke new ground with its sweeping reinterpretations of labor, immigrant, and women's history. It served as a test site for the ideas of practitioners in the new field of public history—a field that links the work of professionally trained historians with many different kinds of projects in the public realm. 

The Lowell Experiment takes an anthropological approach to public history in Lowell, showing it as a complex cultural performance shaped by local memory, the imperatives of economic redevelopment, and tourist rituals—all serving to locate the park's audiences and workers more securely within a changing and uncertain new economy characterized by growing inequalities and new exclusions. 

The paradoxical dual role of Lowell's public historians as both interpreters of and contributors to that new economy raises important questions about the challenges and limitations facing academically trained scholars in contemporary American culture. As a long-standing and well-known example of “culture-led re-development,” Lowell offers an outstanding site for exploring questions of concern to those in the fields of public and urban history, urban planning, and tourism studies.

Robert Francis (1901–1987), the author of eight volumes of poetry, an autobiography, a book of fiction, essays on poetry, and a reminiscence of Robert Frost, lived for most of his career on the outskirts of Amherst, Massachusetts, devoting himself to Yankee simplicity and self-renunciation derived from his reading of Thoreau. His preference for solitude and disinclination to write about or promote himself account for the elusiveness of his persona in his prose and poetry.

This book charts how Francis developed and elaborated this persona through distanced self-portraits in prose and through poems that both reveal and conceal the self of the poet. Folded into the study are discussions of Francis's pastoralism, his affinities with Emerson and Thoreau, his experimentation with new poetic forms, his protest against the Vietnam War and environmental despoliation, his homoeroticism, and a comparison of his poetry with that of Robert Frost. The book also explores Francis's characteristic attitude, figured as “hovering,” where his speaker is both subject and object, writing about himself while inhabiting the role of detached observer.

Complementing the emphasis on Francis's elusiveness, Andrew Stambuk offers readings of his poems attentive to aesthetic qualities that give them their particular reticence. Stambuk's sensitive evaluations underscore that Francis is a craftsman of intricate precisions whose work speaks to contemporary political and global concerns.

In this striking debut volume, Lucas Farrell offers a lyrical and illuminating field guide to the flora and fauna of “worlds just out of reach.” With the precision and detail of an Audubon sketch, he turns his naturalist's eye to the vast landscape of human emotion—all the while affirming “how real this world we live in / must be to live in.”

Journeying ever outward, from the achingly ordinary to the mysterious “land where there is no land,” the narrator of this collection, equal parts pastoralist and surrealist, explores the vivid in-betweens—between love and loss, hilarity and despair, wild and domestic, real and imagined. Hungry, expressive, and original, these poems glean light from even the darkest of fields.

In his second collection, The Marvels, David Orr writes from the conviction that the available world is enough: its worn shirts, coffee cups, rainbows, buses, obsolete machines, failed plans, neighborly borders, and minor acts of courtesy. These poems are clear-eyed without being cold, comic without being merely light. They attend to ordinary things not as symbols waiting to be elevated, but as the actual substance of our shared existence.

Praised by The Washington Post for his “quirky, engaging poetry,” Orr brings formal control, wry wit, whimsy, and an exacting intelligence to the relentless dailiness of life. In “Coffee Cups,” two mugs have been scoured blank by the dishwasher: “Nothing makes them special now. / What they do is all they are.” Yet the household still reaches for them first, “hoping to save the others.” In “Decency,” a nearly useless blue shirt becomes kin to the small social gestures that certify “this shared space as shared”: a held door, a blessing after a sneeze, the habitual signs by which strangers acknowledge one another. And in the title poem, marvels are planted along a property line, where two neighbors meet to prune, argue, trade tools, and admire what grows between them.

Unillusioned but not disenchanted, The Marvels finds its force in persistence, use, courtesy, memory, and care. The poems do not look past the real for consolation. They look steadily at the world we have — its comedy, damage, repetition, and thin but durable fabrics of connection — until its sufficiency comes into view.