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Reclaiming the aesthetic, emphasizing the "literary" in literary studies, conceptualizing a new formalism: such recent appeals represent the latest turn in ongoing debates about art and aesthetic ideology. Intervening in these debates—often characterized by predictable oppositions that set art against social action, structure against cultural practice, and the so-called imaginaries of affect against the putative reality of politics—this special issue of American Literature asks, what's new about the "new aesthetics," and what implications does this shifting ideology have for social and cultural thinking?

Since its founding in 1929, American Literature has been considered the preeminent journal in its field. In this special issue, which celebrates the landmark seventy-fifth anniversary of the journal, past and present editors assess the contribution the journal has made to literary studies by considering the journal's evolution: how it has departed from, remained loyal to, extended, qualified, rejected, or questioned Hubbell's original agenda.

An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Variation in New World English examines acoustical variations in vowel configurations in a wide variety of dialects of English found in the Western Hemisphere.
While the work opens with an introduction on the methods and aims of the study, the following chapter immediately moves to a detailed discussion of distinctive vowel sounds called phonemes, characterizing each variant of sound listed within the cited reference literature. The remaining chapters provide explanatory descriptions of the variants of each dialect, reviewing past research specific to that dialect. While the United States English, Canadian English, and Caribbean varieties are featured in various chapters throughout the work, individual chapters are devoted to African-American, Mexican-American, and Native American English, emphasizing not only ethnic variation but delving into the historical development of each dialect.
This monograph is an essential reference on vowel variation for all sociolinguists, phoneticians, phonologists, creolists, and historical linguists.

A collection of essays by one of the premier historians of American English, Milestones in the History of English in America is a remarkable introduction to Allen Walker Read’s work and the ways in which archival materials can illuminate linguistic history. This volume is divided into four sections: the emergence of American English as a distinct form and the attitudes of both Britons and Americans toward its development; the history of the most distinctive and widespread American coinage, "O.K."; euphemism and obscenity; and an autobiographical section that provides a fascinating portrait of a remarkable American scholar.