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One of the first book-length considerations of the Appalachian writer Robert Morgan.

One of the first book-length studies of Robert Morgan, Community across Time considers the Appalachian writer’s explorations of memory, family history, and landscape. It provides a study of all of Morgan’s fiction to date, as well as a chapter on his poetry and some reference, where appropriate, to his nonfiction. Rebecca Godwin examines the family history that informs much of this body of work, offering an extended biographical essay that ties characters and plot details to Morgan’s ancestors’ lives and to his own experiences growing up in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Religious rifts, economic hardships, class conflicts, the place of women and Indigenous peoples, and the failure of humans to recognize the divinity of the natural world are among the motifs centering Morgan’s writing. Community across Time explores those themes as it looks to Morgan’s relationship to the Appalachian South.

    Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic explores the origins and lasting influences of two contesting but intertwined discourses that persist today when we use the words landscape, country, scenery, nature, national. In the first sense, the land is a physical and bounded body of terrain upon which the nation state is constructed (e.g., the purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain, from sea to shining sea). In the second, the country is constituted through its people and established through time and precedence (e.g., land where our fathers died, land of the Pilgrims’ pride). Kenneth Robert Olwig’s extended exploration of these discourses is a masterful work of scholarship both broad and deep, which opens up new avenues of thinking in the areas of geography, literature, theater, history, political science, law, and environmental studies.
    Olwig tracks these ideas though Anglo-American history, starting with seventeenth-century conflicts between the Stuart kings and the English Parliament, and the Stuart dream of uniting Scotland with England and Wales into one nation on the island of Britain. He uses a royal production of a Ben Jonson masque, with stage sets by architect Inigo Jones, as a touchstone for exploring how the notion of "landscape" expands from artful stage scenery to a geopolitical ideal. Olwig pursues these contested concepts of the body politic from Europe to America and to global politics, illuminating a host of topics, from national parks and environmental planning to theories of polity and virulent nationalistic movements.

In The Nature of Trauma in the American Novel, Michelle Balaev undertakes an ambitious rethinking of the foundations, implementations, and new possibilities of literary trauma theory.

Across contiguous nation-states in Eastern Africa, the geographic proximity disguises an ideological complexity. Land has meant something fundamental in the sociocultural history of each country. Those concerns, however, have manifested into varied political events, and the range of struggles over land has spawned a multiplicity of literary interventions. While Kenya and Uganda were both British colonies, Kenya's experience of settler land alienation made for a much more violent response against efforts at political independence. Uganda's relatively calm unyoking from the colonial burden, however, led to a tumultuous post-independence. Tanzania, too, like Kenya and Uganda, resisted British colonial administration—after Germany's defeat in World War 1.

In Writing on the Soil, author Ng’ang’a Wahu-Mũchiriargues that representations of land and landscape perform significant metaphorical labor in African literatures, and this argument evolves across several geographical spaces. Each chapter's analysis is grounded in a particular locale: western Kenya, colonial Tanganyika, post-independence Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Anam Ka'alakol (Lake Turkana), Kampala, and Kitgum in Northern Uganda. Moreover, each section contributes to a deeper understanding of the aesthetic choices that authors make when deploying tropes revolving around land, landscape, and the environment. Mũchiri disentangles the numerous connections between geography and geopolitical space on the one hand, and ideology and cultural analysis on the other. This book embodies a multi-layered argument in the sphere of African critical scholarship, while adding to the growing field of African land rights scholarship—an approach that foregrounds the close reading of Africa’s literary canon.