Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 Books

Book SynopsisPresents fresh approaches to classic Victorian fiction from 1830-1900. This title opens up for the reader the cultural world in which the Victorian novel was written and read. It provides perspectives on how Victorian fiction relates to different contexts, such as class, sexuality, empire, psychology, law, and biology.Trade Review"[T]his book succeeds in presenting a representative selection of historicist critical thinking on panorama of themes of the novel during the period of what was, arguably, this literary form's greatest achievement. It will be a stimulating introduction for the advanced undergraduate with an interest in the nineteenth century, and a useful lead for the postgraduate student working in the field of Victorian studies on any one of the numerous taught programmes currently on offer." Reference ReviewsTable of ContentsNotes on Contributors ix Acknowledgements xii List of illustrations xiii Chronology xiv Introduction 1Francis O’Gorman 1 ‘The sun and moon were made to give them light’: Empire in the Victorian Novel 4Cannon Schmitt 2 ‘Seeing is believing?’: Visuality and Victorian Fiction 25Kate Flint 3 ‘The boundaries of social intercourse’: Class in the Victorian Novel 47James Eli Adams 4 Legal subjects, legal objects: The Law and Victorian Fiction 71Clare Pettitt 5 ‘The withering of the individual’: Psychology in the Victorian Novel 91Nicholas Dames 6 ‘Telling of my weekly doings’: The Material Culture of the Victorian Novel 113Mark W. Turner 7 ‘Farewell poetry and aerial flights’: The Function of the Author and Victorian Fiction 134Richard Salmon 8 Everywhere and nowhere: Sexuality in the Victorian Novel 156Carolyn Dever 9 ‘One of the larger lost continents’: Religion in the Victorian Novel 180Michael Wheeler 10 ‘The difference between human beings’: Biology in the Victorian Novel 202Angelique Richardson 11 ‘One great confederation?’: Europe in the Victorian Novel 232John Rignall 12 ‘A long deep sob of that mysterious wondrous happiness that is one with pain’: Emotion in the Victorian Novel 253Francis O’Gorman Index 271

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Book SynopsisThis original study is the first fully to acknowledge the impact of early grief on Wordsworth''s poetry and to integrate it into a critical account of how his art developed from 1787 to 1813. Looks at the impact of grief on Wordsworth''s great poetry. Explains the importance of the poet''s great, unfinished epic ''The Recluse'' to his work as a whole. Includes 20 illustrations from original notebooks. Contains the first annotated text of ''The White Doe of Rylstone''. Trade Review"A major achievement. A marvellous combination of profound scholarship and equally profound speculative insight." Professor Stephen Gill, Oxford University "Wordsworth: An Inner Life shows that it is still possible to say new things about a life and a literary oeuvre which might seem, in outline, all too familiar." Times Literary Supplement "This is traditional scholarship at its best, attentive to detail and immersed in a welter of poetic sources, which will no doubt be studied and absorbed by bright graduate students and Wordsworth experts." Times Higher Education Supplement "In his reconstruction of Wordsworth's "inner life", Wu offers a compelling blend of biography and literary criticism." Religious Studies ReviewTable of ContentsList of Illustrations vii Preface viii Acknowledgments xii A Note on Texts xiv Abbreviations xv 1 ‘Perhaps my pains might be beguil’d 1 2 ‘In black Helvellyn’s inmost womb’ 20 3 ‘Charg’d by magic’ 43 4 ‘The world is poisoned at the heart’ 69 5 ‘Their life is hidden with God’ 88 6 ‘The vital spirit of a perfect form’ 118 Part I: October 1798-April 1799 118 Between Parts I and II: April-May 1799 134 Part II: May-December 1799 146 7 ‘Serious musing and self-reproach’ 167 8 ‘I yearn towards some philosophic song’ 189 9 ‘That vast Abiding-place’ 210 10 ‘I only look’d for pain and grief’ 231 11 ‘Forbearance & self-sacrifice’ 257 12 ‘O teach me calm submission to thy will’ 275 Epilogue 303 Appendix: The White Doe of Rylstone (1808 Text) and it’s ‘Advertizement’ 316 Bibliography 347 Index 361

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Book SynopsisThis introductory guide to Walt Whitman weaves together the writer's life with an examination of his works. An innovative introductory guide to Walt Whitman. Weaves together the writer's life with an examination of his works. Focuses especially on Whitman's evolving masterpiece Leaves of Grass. Examines the material conditions and products of Whitman's scripted life, including his original manuscripts. Investigates Whitman's life in print his belief that he could literally embody himself in his books. Linked to a large electronic archive of Whitman's work at www.whitmanarchive.orgTrade Review"...Their Re-Scripting Walt Whitman is far more than an introductory guide to the poet's life and work. Folsom and Price have produced an incisive, gracefully written book that offers an important new approach to Leaves of Grass ... The result is a book valuable for whoever, novice or expert, undertakes to hold Walt Whitman in hand." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, Volume Twenty-Three, Numbers Three/Four, Winter/Spring 2006 “Drawing on their extensive experience with electronic editing, more specifically, their work with the Walt Whitman Archive, Ed Folsom and Ken Price reconstruct the details of the poet's life and thread through that life the complex but fascinating story of Whitman's evolving master-piece, Leaves of Grass. By emphasizing the manuscript origins of the poetry, Folsom and Price reveal that just about everything we thought we knew about this much-discussed writer and his work is subject to revision. At nearly every turn, Re-Scripting Walt Whitman seems to proclaim, ‘Allons! the road is before us!’ ” Donald D. Kummings, Co-editor, Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia “Whitman is America’s ever-fluid text. Thorough, concise, and engagingly written, Re-scripting Walt Whitman illuminates the life and works — the poet’s sexuality, politics, and ceaseless growth — with an important new emphasis on manuscripts, revision, and the innovative online Whitman Archive that will startle general readers and literary scholars alike.” John Bryant, Hofstra University "A splendid primer to the complexities of Whitman's prose and verse. Folsom and Price expertly trace the evolution of Whitman's career and the gradual growth of Leaves of Grass. Scholars no less than novices will be inspired to read Whitman with fresh insight." Gary F. Scharnhorst, University of New Mexico “Re-Scripting Walt Whitman accomplishes two significant tasks at once. It ties Whitman's poetry to his life in a clear, down-to-earth narrative of biographical detail and literary accomplishment. And it breaks new ground in its portrayal of Whitman as a working poet, one who knew his way around a print shop and based his radical innovations on an intimate knowledge of type, print, ink, and bookmaking. Drawing on their own experience in constructing a new electronic Whitman archive, Ed Folsom and Kenneth Price provide unique lessons in reading the actual materiality of Whitman's poems as the first step toward grasping their meanings.” Alan Trachtenberg, Yale UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments. List of Abbreviations of Whitman’s Works. Introduction. 1 Growing up in the Age of Accelerating Print: Whitman as Printer, Journalist, Teacher, and Fiction Writer. 2 “Many Manuscript Doings and Undoings”: The Road toward Leaves of Grass. 3 “I Was Chilled with the Cold Types and Cylinder and Wet Paper Between Us”: The First and Second Editions of Leaves of Grass. 4 Intimate Script and the New American Bible: “Calamus” and the Making of the 1860 Leaves of Grass. 5 Blood-Stained Memoranda. 6 Reconstructing Leaves of Grass, Restructuring a Life. 7 Dying into Leaves. Appendix: What Whitman Left Us. References. Index

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Book SynopsisHow to Read the Victorian Novel unpicks our comfortable expectations of the genre to fully explore just how unfamiliar its familiarity is: emphasizing the complexity and contradictions in Victorian writers' attempts to deal with a world heading into modernity at full speed.Trade Review"Reading How to Read the Victorian Novel, I found myself nodding along, admiring the vigor and clarity with which Levine articulate what we all ready know. . . until I was brought up short by the recognition that 1 didn't actually know these things, so simply and so fundamentally, until Levine had said them in this book." (Victorian Studies, Winter 2010)“Most interesting is his commentary upon the panoramic/encyclopedic nature of Victorian fiction, the commitment to recognizable generic modes, and the novelists’ interest in finding connections among diverse aspects of experience.” (Studies in English Literature, Fall 2008) "A broad-ranging introduction to the genre using examples from the classics." (Times Higher Education Supplement)Table of ContentsPreface. 1. What’s Victorian about the Victorian Novel?. 2. The Beginnings and Pickwick. 3. Vanity Fair and Victorian Realism. 4. Jane, David, and the Bildungsroman. 5. The Sensation Novel and The Woman in White. 6. Middlemarch. Index

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Book SynopsisHow to Read the Victorian Novel unpicks our comfortable expectations of the genre to fully explore just how unfamiliar its familiarity is: emphasizing the complexity and contradictions in Victorian writers' attempts to deal with a world heading into modernity at full speed.Trade Review"Reading How to Read the Victorian Novel, I found myself nodding along, admiring the vigor and clarity with which Levine articulate what we all ready know. . . until I was brought up short by the recognition that 1 didn't actually know these things, so simply and so fundamentally, until Levine had said them in this book." (Victorian Studies, Winter 2010)“Any student of Victorian fiction and culture will benefit from reading this refreshing reexamination of the major Victorian novels. Recommended.” (Choice Reviews, October 2008) "A broad-ranging introduction to the genre using examples from the classics." Times Higher Education SupplementTable of ContentsPreface. 1. What’s Victorian about the Victorian Novel?. 2. The Beginnings and Pickwick. 3. Vanity Fair and Victorian Realism. 4. Jane, David, and the Bildungsroman. 5. The Sensation Novel and The Woman in White. 6. Middlemarch. Index

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Book SynopsisThis unique introduction explores Herman Melville as he described himself in Billy Budd-a writer whom few know. Moving beyond the recurring depiction of Melville as the famous author of Moby-Dick, this book traces his development as a writer while providing the basic tools for successful critical reading of his novels. Offers a brief introduction to Melville, covering all his major works Showcases Melville''s writing process through his correspondence with Nathaniel Hawthorne Provides a clear sense of Melville''s major themes and preoccupations Focuses on Typee, Moby-Dick, and Billy Budd in individual chapters Includes a biography, summary of key works, interpretation, commentary, and an extensive bibliography. Trade Review“In Herman Melville: An Introduction, Wyn Kelley offers new and sharp insights as well as the basics of Melville studies in a thoroughly engaging voice for all readers, undergraduate and above.” John Bryant, Hofstra UniversityTable of ContentsTexts and Abbreviations. List of Illustrations. Acknowledgments. Preface. Part I: Introduction. 1. Melville’s Life. 2. ‘Agatha’ and the Invention of Narrative. Part II: Melville’s Early Yarns. 3. ‘Making Literary Use of the Story’: Typee and Omoo. 4. ‘A Regular Story Founded on Striking Incidents’: Mardi, Redburn, and White-Jacket. Part III: Writing New Gospel in Moby-Dick and Pierre. 5. ‘So Much of Pathos & So Much of Depth’: Moby-Dick. 6. ‘All Tender Obligations’: Pierre. Part IV: Turning a New Leaf: Short Fiction, Israel Potter, and The Confidence-Man. 7. ‘A Leaf from Professional Experience’: Short Fiction of the 1850s. 8. ‘Peculiarly Latitudinarian Notions’: Israel Potter and The Confidence-Man. Part V: Melville’s Later Career. 9. ‘Fulness & Veins & Beauty’: Battle-Pieces and Clarel. 10. ‘Different Considerations’: Late Poetry. 11. ‘Instinct with Significance’: Billy Budd. Afterword: ‘Restoring To You Your Own Property’: Owning Melville. Appendix: The ‘Agatha’ Correspondence. Notes. Bibliography. Index

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Book SynopsisThis unique introduction explores Herman Melville as he described himself in Billy Budd-a writer whom few know. Moving beyond the recurring depiction of Melville as the famous author of Moby-Dick, this book traces his development as a writer while providing the basic tools for successful critical reading of his novels. Offers a brief introduction to Melville, covering all his major works Showcases Melville''s writing process through his correspondence with Nathaniel Hawthorne Provides a clear sense of Melville''s major themes and preoccupations Focuses on Typee, Moby-Dick, and Billy Budd in individual chapters Includes a biography, summary of key works, interpretation, commentary, and an extensive bibliography. Trade Review“Read alongside Melville's original writings, this book will be an excellent companion for a Melville course. Essential.” (Choice, November 2008)Table of ContentsTexts and Abbreviations. List of Illustrations. Acknowledgments. Preface. Part I: Introduction. 1. Melville’s Life. 2. ‘Agatha’ and the Invention of Narrative. Part II: Melville’s Early Yarns. 3. ‘Making Literary Use of the Story’: Typee and Omoo. 4. ‘A Regular Story Founded on Striking Incidents’: Mardi, Redburn, and White-Jacket. Part III: Writing New Gospel in Moby-Dick and Pierre. 5. ‘So Much of Pathos & So Much of Depth’: Moby-Dick. 6. ‘All Tender Obligations’: Pierre. Part IV: Turning a New Leaf: Short Fiction, Israel Potter, and The Confidence-Man. 7. ‘A Leaf from Professional Experience’: Short Fiction of the 1850s. 8. ‘Peculiarly Latitudinarian Notions’: Israel Potter and The Confidence-Man. Part V: Melville’s Later Career. 9. ‘Fulness & Veins & Beauty’: Battle-Pieces and Clarel. 10. ‘Different Considerations’: Late Poetry. 11. ‘Instinct with Significance’: Billy Budd. Afterword: ‘Restoring To You Your Own Property’: Owning Melville. Appendix: The ‘Agatha’ Correspondence. Notes. Bibliography. Index

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Book SynopsisPresents information about the range of British fiction published between 1837 and 1901. This work explains issues such as Victorian religions, class structure and Darwinism. It is suitable for students and researchers seeking coverage of contexts and trends, or as a starting point for a survey course.Trade Review"These are wonderful essays [...] written by important scholars in the field. [...]Highly recommended." Choice "another Blackwell reference work of prodigious proportions [...] by a galaxy of distinguished scholars [...] indispensable for any comprehensive reference library, destined indeed to be of permanent value and importance for many years to come." Reference ReviewsTable of ContentsAcknowledgments viii The Contributors ix Introduction 1Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing Part I Historical Contexts and Cultural Issues 9 1 The Publishing World 11Kelly J. Mays 2 Education, Literacy, and the Victorian Reader 31Jonathan Rose 3 Money, the Economy, and Social Class 48Regenia Gagnier 4 Victorian Psychology 67Athena Vrettos 5 Empire, Race, and the Victorian Novel 84Deirdre David 6 The Victorian Novel and Religion 101Hilary Fraser 7 Scientific Ascendancy 119John Kucich 8 Technology and Information: Accelerating Developments 137Christopher Keep 9 Laws, the Legal World, and Politics 155John R. Reed 10 Gender Politics and Women’s Rights 172Hilary M. Schor 11 The Other Arts: Victorian Visual Culture 189Jeffrey Spear 12 Imagined Audiences: The Novelist and the Stage 207Renata Kobetts Miller Part II Forms of the Victorian Novel 225 13 Newgate Novel to Detective Fiction 227F. S. Schwarzbach 14 The Historical Novel 244John Bowen 15 The Sensation Novel 260Winifred Hughes 16 The Bildungsroman 279John R. Maynard 17 The Gothic Romance in the Victorian Period 302Cannon Schmitt 18 The Provincial or Regional Novel 318Ian Duncan 19 Industrial and “Condition of England” Novels 336James Richard Simmons, Jr. 20 Children’s Fiction 353Lewis C. Roberts 21 Victorian Science Fiction 370Patrick Brantlinger Part III Victorian and Modern Theories of the Novel and the Reception of Novels and Novelists Then and Now 385 22 The Receptions of Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy 387Elizabeth Langland 23 Victorian Theories of the Novel 406Joseph W. Childers 24 Modern and Postmodern Theories of Prose Fiction 424Audrey Jaffe 25 The Afterlife of the Victorian Novel: Novels about Novels 442Anne Humpherys 26 The Victorian Novel in Film and on Television 458Joss Marsh and Kamilla Elliott Index 478

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Book SynopsisWhy Victorian Literature Still Matters is a passionate defense of the enduring impact of Victorian realism today. With a nod to the popularity of phrenology within that era, noted literary scholar Philip Davis points to a corner of the human mind where all Victorian literature resides.Trade Review"Philip Davis's Blackwell manifesto offers a spirited, polemical defence of Victorian literature in general, and Victorian realism in particular, against its modernist and postmodernist detractors." (Oxford Journals, 1 June 2011) "In Why Victorian Literature Still Matters, Davis writes as a reader. Readers, as he defines them, are different from scholars and critics. Who distance themselves from the worlds before them by turning to history or theory instead. Readers, by contrast, do not distance themselves at all, but rather seek ever more closeness." (Victorian Studies, Winter 2010)"Davis's manifesto will capture the attention of a wide readership of intellectuals and serious readers alike who will appreciate his rigorous discussions and insightful analyses, for while he directs such readers away from questions merely academic and critical, he is not afraid to reveal the personal significance of Victorian literature to modern sensibilities." (The Cambridge Quarterly, June 2009) "With its thought-provoking readings and non-pretentious display of erudition, the book could serve well as a useful introduction to the literature of the Victorian period or as a source of stimulation for teachers and scholars in the field." (Neo-Victorian Studies, Winter 2008/2009) "Why Victorian Literature Still Matters is at its best when it attends to the small detail, the odd or apt grammatical gesture, the minute editorial changes that produce meaning at the most micro of levels." (Times Higher Education Supplement, January 2009) “Part of a series exploring a broad range of subject areas, this book is admittedly subjective in its exploration of the relevance of Victorian literature in the 21st century. Davis notes that it is intended for the reader rather than the scholar, but it will be of more interest to academic than to public libraries.” (Library Journal, January 2009) "Philip Davis's [book] ... Was fascinating about Victorian writing, and one of the best books written about how novels can work." (The Guardian, November 2008)Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Victorian Bump and Where to Find It 1 1 Victorian Hard Wiring 9 2 Isaiah and Ezekiel – But What About Charley? 35 3 Not So Straightforward: Realist Prose and What It Hides Within Itself 54 4 A Literature In Time 81 5 Individual Agents 112 6 A Few of My Favorite Things: A Glove, a Sandal, and Plaited Hair 138 Notes 161 Index 168

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Book SynopsisReflecting the dynamic and expansive nature of Austen studies, A Companion to Jane Austen provides 42 essays from a distinguished team of literary scholars that examine the full breadth of the English novelist's works and career.Trade Review"While other companions provide scholarly summary-context and assessment-as a starting place for further research, this companion seems more individualized.... A Companion to Jane Austen offers the useful charms of knowledge, stimulation, judgment." (1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, September 2010) "The advantage is that the chapters tend to be manageable, clear, and focused-perfect, in fact, for assigning to undergraduate and beginning graduate students. I for one certainly plan on doing that. After all, one of the charms of enchantment is that it can be contagious." (Notes and Queries, March 2010) "This book would be a worthy addition to any university, school and even private library in a place where Austen is read and re-read." (Transnational Literature, May 2009) "Austenites should be delighted with this comprehensive survey of contemporary Austen studies. [...] This should become a standard Austen reference. Highly recommended." (Choice, August 2009) "How is it that fresh perspectives on Austen and her writing are still being thought up? Johnson and Tuite answer that the study of Austen today is a "diverse, expansive, excitable and critical life-form", growing and changing with new audiences and approaches to literary criticism. Arranged in five parts, this Companion covers the style and genre of her novels, including the history of manuscripts, editions and illustrations (with 13 black-and-white facsimiles); individual readings of the main texts, looking at how Austen was initially received by critics and readers alike and the success of Pride and Prejudice; Austen's literary style and technique, showing how the author used language and who she was influenced by; the political, social and cultural settings of her novels, discussing the French Revolution and feminism; and how Austen has been "reinvented" by different generations, from the “silver fork” novel of the Victorian era to "sexed-up" television adaptations of our screens today." (Reference Reviews, December 2009)Table of ContentsList of Figures ix Notes on Contributors x List of Abbreviations xvii A Note to the Reader xviii Acknowledgments xix Introduction 1 Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite Part I The Life and the Texts 11 1 Jane Austen's Life and Letters 13 Kathryn Sutherland 2 The Austen Family Writing: Gossip, Parody, and Corporate Personality 31 Robert L. Mack 3 The Literary Marketplace 41 Jan Fergus 4 Texts and Editions 51 Brian Southam 5 Jane Austen, Illustrated 62 Laura Carroll and John Wiltshire Part II Reading the Texts 79 6 Young Jane Austen: Author 81 Juliet McMaster 7 Moving In and Out: The Property of Self in Sense and Sensibility 91 Susan C. Greenfi eld 8 The Illusionist: Northanger Abbey and Austen’s Uses of Enchantment 101 Sonia Hofkosh 9 Re: Reading Pride and Prejudice: "What think you of books?" 112 Susan J. Wolfson 10 The Missed Opportunities of Mansfi eld Park 123 William Galperin 11 Emma: Word Games and Secret Histories 133 Linda Bree 12 Persuasion: The Gradual Dawning 143 Fiona Stafford 13 Sanditon and the Book 153 George Justice Part III Literary Genres and Genealogies 163 14 Turns of Speech and Figures of Mind 165 Margaret Anne Doody 15 Narrative Technique: Austen and Her Contemporaries 185 Jane Spencer 16 Time and Her Aunt 195 Michael Wood 17 Austen's Realist Play 206 Harry E. Shaw 18 Dealing in Notions and Facts: Jane Austen and History Writing 216 Devoney Looser 19 Sentiment and Sensibility: Austen, Feeling, and Print Culture 226 Miranda Burgess 20 The Gothic Austen 237 Nancy Armstrong Part IV Political, Social, and Cultural Worlds 249 21 From Politics to Silence: Jane Austen’s Nonreferential Aesthetic 251 Mary Poovey 22 The Army, the Navy, and the Napoleonic Wars 261 Gillian Russell 23 Jane Austen, the 1790s, and the French Revolution 272 Mary Spongberg 24 Feminisms 282 Vivien Jones 25 Imagining Sameness and Difference: Domestic and Colonial Sisters in Mansfield Park 292 Deirdre Coleman 26 Jane Austen and the Nation 304 Claire Lamont 27 Religion 314 Roger E. Moore 28 Family Matters 323 Ruth Perry 29 Austen and Masculinity 332 E. J. Clery 30 The Trouble with Things: Objects and the Commodifi cation of Sociability 343 Barbara M. Benedict 31 Luxury: Making Sense of Excess in Austen’s Narratives 355 Diego Saglia 32 Austen's Accomplishment: Music and the Modern Heroine 366 Gillen D'Arcy Wood 33 Jane Austen and Performance: Theatre, Memory, and Enculturation 377 Daniel O'Quinn Part V Reception and Reinvention 389 34 Jane Austen and Genius 391 Deidre Lynch 35 Jane Austen's Periods 402 Mary A. Favret 36 Nostalgia 413 Nicholas Dames 37 Austen's European Reception 422 Anthony Mandal 38 Jane Austen and the Silver Fork Novel 434 Edward Copeland 39 Jane Austen in the World: New Women, Imperial Vistas 444 Katie Trumpener 40 Sexuality 456 Fiona Brideoake 41 Jane Austen and Popular Culture 467 Judy Simons 42 Austenian Subcultures 478 Mary Ann O'Farrell Bibliography 488 Index 513

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Book SynopsisReading Eighteenth-Century Poetry recaptures for modern readers the urgency, distinctiveness and rewarding nature of this challenging and powerful body of poetry. An essential guide to reading eighteenth-century poetry, written by world-renowned critic, Patricia Meyer Spacks Exposes the multiplicity of forms, tones, and topics engaged by poets during this period Provides in-depth analysis of poems by established figures such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, as well as work by less familiar figures, including Anne Finch and Mary Leapor A broadly chronological structure incorporates close reading alongside insightful contextual and historical detail Captures the power and uniqueness of eighteenth-century poetry, creating an ideal guide for those returning to this period, or delving into it for the first time Trade Review"Reading Eighteenth-Century Poetry, a book designated for the specialist and general reader alike." (Studies in English Literature, Summer 2010) "The readings that Spacks provides are nuanced and stimulating. Each of the chapters is organized around the detailed close reading of three to four poems which are related to each other in order to exemplify the range of possible responses to phenomena such as emotion, reflection or description. Spacks's guidance introduces the student reader to the generic and thematic fluidity of eighteenth-century poetry but also offers stimulating readings to the experienced scholar." (English Studies, August 2010) "Spacks is an impressive close reader, and her lively, persuasive analyses offer exemplary models to students coming to this method or subject for the first time." (CHOICE, August 2009)Table of ContentsPreamble. 1 How to Live: The Moral and the Social. 2 Matters of Feeling: Poetry of Emotion. 3 The Power of Detail: Description in Verse. 4 High Language and Low: The Diction of Poetry. 5 Alexander Pope and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. 6 How to Live: The Place of Work. 7 Matters of Feeling: Forms of the Personal. 8 Structures of Energy, Structures of Leisure: Ode and Blank Verse. 9 Old Poetry, Old Language: Imitation and Fraud. 10 Outliers: Mary Leapor and Christopher Smart. 11 How to Live: Poetry and Politics. 12 Matters of Feeling: Emotion Celebrated. 13 Narrative and Reflection. 14 Poetic Languages: Diction Old and New. 15 Mary Robinson and William Cowper. Bibliography. Index.

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Book SynopsisAmerican Literature in Context from 1865 to 1929 is the perfect companion for readers who want to familiarize themselves with the historical events and literary movements that shaped American literature from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Great Depression.Trade Review“American Literature in Context to 1865 can be a key critical reading for various antebellum literature courses, as well as for other members of her targeted ‘widest possible audience’seeking to deepen their knowledge of various early American literary moments.” (Oxford Journals Clippings, 4 May 2012)Table of ContentsTimeline of Texts and Historical Events viii Introduction 1 1 Civil War Memories 6 2 “A Serfdom of Poverty and Restricted Rights”: Black Americans after Emancipation 16 3 Immigrants 33 4 Countrysides 54 5 The Poor and the Wealthy 68 6 To Change America 86 7 Culminations: From the US Entry into World War I to 1929 114 Index 138

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Book SynopsisThis Companion brings together specially commissioned essays by distinguished international scholars that reflect both the diversity of Victorian poetry and the variety of critical approaches that illuminate it.Trade Review"Yet overall, and at its best, it provides what few critical books can offer: a highly readable, even rollicking account of the whole era, as variegated and lively as Victorian poetry itself." (Review 19, 2011) "[A] comprehensive, challenging picture of Victorian poetry emerges when reading the entire collection of essays.... A feast of information." (Brontë Studies, November 2009) "The essays within are excellent. I think it an indispensable book. The essays address the multifariousness of Victorian poetry, and the variety of critical and theoretical issues; in addition, they give the reader a sense of the marketing and reception of the poetry." (Studies in English Literature, Fall 2008) "Scholars will want to own this book.... Highly recommended." (Choice) "A rich diversity of distinguished and learned scholars, mostly from North America and the UK, have combined in this singularly impressive and important volume, to provide what for many might at first sight seem to be an almost impossible harvest: fresh and original essays on carefully selected aspects of the poetry of Victorian England." (Reference Reviews) "Nicely affordable for the wealth of insights contained therein. Contains some fresh research.... This companion will not sit on the shelf and collect dust, but [will] be useful for both scholarly and entertaining reading." (English Literature in Transition) "Not only is the Companion brimming with fine arguments—there are far too many essays that warrant notice than can possibly be picked out in a short review—but it is also very well put together as a collection. Its clear table of contents and fulsome index make it easy to negotiate. Each essay is, moreover, followed by a generous list of references and suggested further reading." (The Tennyson Research Bulletin)Table of ContentsEditors’ Preface viii Notes on Contributors x Chronology xv Introduction: Victorian Poetics 1Carol T. Christ PART ONE Varieties and Forms 23 1 Epic 25Herbert F. Tucker 2 Domestic and Idyllic 42Linda H. Peterson 3 Lyric 59Matthew Rowlinson 4 Dramatic Monologue 80E. Warwick Slinn 5 Sonnet and Sonnet Sequence 99Alison Chapman 6 Elegy 115Seamus Perry 7 Hymn 134J. R. Watson 8 Nonsense 155Roderick McGillis 9 Verse Novel 171Dino Felluga 10 Verse Drama 187Adrienne Scullion 11 Working-Class Poetry 204Florence Boos 12 The Classical Tradition 229Richard Jenkyns 13 Arthurian Poetry and Medievalism 246Antony H. Harrison 14 Poetry in Translation 262J.-A. George 15 Tractarian Poetry 279Stephen Prickett 16 The Spasmodics 291Richard Cronin 17 The Pre-Raphaelite School 305David Riede 18 The Poetry of the 1890s 321Chris Snodgrass PART TWO Production, Distribution and Reception 343 19 The Market 345Lee Erickson 20 Anthologies and the Making of the Poetic Canon 361Natalie M. Houston 21 Reviewing 378Joanne Shattock 22 Poetry and Illustration 392Lorraine Janzen Kooistra PART THREE Victorian Poetry and Victorian Culture 419 23 Nationhood and Empire 421Margaret Linley 24 Poetry in the Four Nations 438Matthew Campbell 25 Poetry and Religion 457W. David Shaw 26 Poetry and Science 475Alan Rauch 27 Landscape and Cityscape 493Pauline Fletcher 28 Vision and Visuality 510Catherine Maxwell 29 Marriage and Gender 526Julia F. Saville 30 Sexuality and Love 543John Maynard Index 567

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Book SynopsisMichie's fresh reading of the marriage plot, and the choice between two women at its heart, shows it to be as much about politics and economics as it is about personal choice.Trade Review"An excellent book, one that will be eagerly read and regularly cited as an original, authoritative study of a major issue in nineteenth-century literature and culture." (John Kucich, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey)"Table of ContentsPreface: Vulgarity, Wealth, and GenderAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Rich Woman / Poor Woman: An Anthropology of the Nineteenth-Century Marriage Plot1. Social Distinction in Jane Austen2. Frances Trollope and the Problem of Appetite3. Anthony Trollope's "Subtle Materialism"4. Margaret Oliphant and the Professional Ideal5. Henry James and the End(s) of the Marriage PlotAfterword From Pemberley to ManderleyNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisScholars of Victorian literature and culture, as well as readers interested in children's literature, childhood studies, and gender studies, will welcome this excellent work from a major figure in the field.Trade ReviewNelson dips into a variety of 19th-century works, mostly novels, to examine the effort writersmade-through youthful characters but also through adults who refuse to grow up-to change society, especially to alter the way children were raised in Victorian England... The range of works is considered extensive and the book is convincing and readable. Choice The chief value of her study is probably in its insights into individual texts, which will be of great interest to children's literature specialists and Dickens scholars in particular. But it is well worth considering these larger implications, and Victorianists in general will find the book both richly informative and thought-provoking. -- Jacqueline Banerjee The Victorian Web Precocious Children and Childish Adults certainly makes an important contribution to Victorian children's studies, but it also contributes more broadly to the study of gender, identity, race, class, and empire in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Indeed, while the 'queering of age' at first seems a narrow concern, Nelson quickly reveals it to be an extraordinarily useful lens through which to observe the breakdown of all sorts of categories through which to see the entire period with new clarity. -- Virginia Zimmerman Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies Claudia Nelson's enlightening study compels the reader to investigate the vexed and often unrecognised exchanges between childhood to adulthood in Victorian literature and culture. -- Rebecca Brown Victoriographies Sharp, articulate, erudite, and theoretically nuanced. The Year's Work in English Studies The book offers a highly nuanced and evocative interpretive project that assembles cases from a variety of texts, including children's tales and adult fiction, in different registers and with diverse audiences. Nelson also engages contemporaneous theories of psychological development. In sheer breadth of coverage, the book is inspiring. It is a slim volume with great volume. -- Karen Chase Nineteenth-Century Literature Precocious Children lays a solid foundation for its claim that age inversion as a category is at least as important as gender or class in understanding the cultural dynamic of the era. Each chapter evinces extensive grounding in historical and critical writing about the texts under consideration. -- Naomi Wood Children's Literature This text is essential reading for anyone interested in transcending static, simplistic constructs of Victorian childhood. Nelson's study provides a necessary framework with which to navigate the worldly-wise and the young at heart in nineteenth-century fiction. -- Katherine Wakely-Mulroney International Research in Children's Literature Precocious Children and Childish Adults is a powerful argument for the inclusion of age in literary analysis, and a study that is sure to generate a new body of work, not only among Victorian scholars but among all scholars interested in literature and childhood, from any time period and continent. -- Emily Hamilton-Honey Kritikon LitterarumTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Old-Fashioned Child and the Uncanny Double2. The Arrested Child-Man and Social Threat3. Women as Girls4. Girls as Women5. Boys as MenConclusion: The Adult Reader as ChildNotesWorks CitedIndex

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Book SynopsisThis forward-thinking and revealing investigation offers scholars and ardent fans of Jane Austen a wealth of historical facts, while shedding an interpretive light on a new aspect of the beloved writer's work.Trade ReviewAn impeccably researched new book. Examiner.com Matters of Fact in Jane Austen is unlike any previous work of Austen criticism, both in its attention to minute historical detail and in its pioneering claims... [It] is meticulously researched, beautifully written, highly original, and unquestionably timely. It ought to stimulate not just rousing arguments but provoke, too, further historically attuned Austen scholarship. -- Devoney Looser Los Angeles Review of Books This is a book whose charm and clarity easily overcome any initial resistance one might have to its central claim that Austen's work actively partakes in what historians now call 'celebrity culture'... One of Barchas's most surprising-and ultimately convincing-claims is that Austen, like James Joyce after her, 'not only names her fictional characters with uncanny historical precision but maps them with equal care through historical settings'. She illustrates this with careful attention to Austen's own historical reading and letters, prints of contemporary maps, portraits and country houses. -- Jonathan Sachs Times Literary Supplement This is easily one of the most important books on Austen published in recent years, a must read. Thanks to fantastic volumes like this one... Austen's books are finally being read and reassessed in the context of their times and are no longer given the backhanded compliment of being called 'timeless'... Essential. (Named by Choice in its list of Outstanding Academic Titles, 2013) Choice A provocative, suggestive, and original book which makes a genuine contribution to scholarship on Jane Austen... It is an excellent example of a truly interdisciplinary approach to literary criticism. -- Katie Halsey Review of English Studies This is a huge achievement. -- Sarah Raff Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies The author seeks to pull Austen away from her timelessness... Jane is not just a keen observer of those 3 or 4 families but of all the aristocracy famous or scandalous enough to make the papers... In a world where feminine accomplishments and interests are still denigrated and marginalized, it's important to pull Jane out of the parlor. Plot Driven Moving away from domesticity and beyond broad social history, Matters of Fact in Jane Austen proceeds as a series of detailed case studies that, taken together, make a strong argument for Austen as a popular culture aficionado and for scholars' attachment to her vaunted 'timelessness' as a disservice to her powers of observation and allusion. -- Laura E. Thomason, Middle Georgia State College ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts One of the most elegant new critical books I've encountered recently... a very original and well-researched, sometimes mind-blowing study of the numerous real-world people who stand 'behind' individual Austen characters. Barchas is stunning, for example, on Northanger Abbey, one of Austen's more elusive fictions. -- Terry Castle The Lumiere Reader 'Meticulous' will also inevitably be the word most often used to describe Janine Barchas's latest book. The research that has informed Matters of Fact in Jane Austen:History, Location, and Celebrity is abundant and careful, making this a fascinating and fresh take on Austen studies. Much like the 'What Jane Saw' website, the bookstarts from the contention that Austen was well aware of and sensitive to the news and newsmakers of her day, and that the realities of her specific historical moment influence aspects of her novels. Studies in the Novel Critics have often recognized Austen's care with locational details in particular, but have done little more. Barchas's compelling geographical and spatial arguments... had me reading with my iPad in hand, toggling between various maps of Bath and the book ... A Google maps assignment awaits my England summer study-abroad students-cum-surveyors. Eighteenth-Century Fiction Janine Barchas's well-researched and beautifully written book recovers some interesting historical contexts for once-celebrated names from Britain's historical past... Matters of Fact [is] a book that every reader will find profitable and delightful to peruse. -- Linda Troost JASNA News In this absorbing study, Barchas unearths real people, events, and locations. -- Kim Wheatley Eighteenth-Century Life Intriguing, witty, and detailed re-examination of character in Austen... Barchas makes a compelling case for her theories and writes with wit and elegance. The book is generously illustrated and unfolds at times almost like a detective story. Original and exciting, it's a must read for any serious -- or even not-so-serious -- Austen fan. Jane Austen's Regency World Magazine Janine Barchas persuasively positions Austen as a local and national historian. In a study which discusses Lady Susan, Northanger Abbey, Evelyn, Sense and Sensibility, and Persuasiion, Barchas uncovers the complex and subtle contexts, connotations, and resonances of Austen's material culture and character names. Year's Work in English Studies Janine Barchas's thought-provoking study of Austen's naming practices unearths a wealth of historical antecedents for Austen's characters and posits an Austen whose gamesmanship with the names of persons and places rivals the knowingness and playfulness of James Joyce. Journal of British Studies Like a thrilling detective story, Barchas's study consistently and pleasurably overcomes the incredulity and skepticism it provokes. Besides inspiring serious and sustained reassessment of Austen's novels, Barchas's findings may also lead us to re-examine long settled conclusions regarding the dates of Austen's compositions and revisions... One hopes that Barchas's method might be usefully applied to Austen's contemporaries in order to further evaluate the relationships between 'matters of fact' and the period's fiction. Review 19Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsAbbreviationsIntroduction: "History, real solemn history" in Austen1. "Quite unconnected": The Wentworths and Lady Susan2. Mapping Northanger Abbey to Find "Old Allen" of Prior Park3. Touring Farleigh Hungerford Castle and Remembering Mis Tilney-Long4. "The Celebrated Mr. Evelyn" of Silva in Burney and Austen5. Hell-Fire Jane: Dashwood Celebrity and Sense and Sensibility6. Persuasion's Battle of the Books: Baronetage versus Navy ListAfterword: Jane Austen's Fictive NetworkNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisThis book should be of interest to students and scholars of comparative literature, world literature, and the history and theory of the modern novel.Trade Review"Jobst Welge's impressive new book... argues deftly for an intimate relation between national geography and historical narrative." Times Literary Supplement "Jobst Welge's impressive new book... argues deftly for an intimate relation between national geography and historical narrative." -- Talia Schaffer Times Literary Supplement One of the most significant critical works about the European/American novel since Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957). ChoiceTable of ContentsList of AbbreviationsAcknowledgments1. Introduction2. Periphery and Genealogical Discontinuity: The Historical Novel of the Celtic Fringe (Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott)3. Progress and Pessimism: The Sicilian Novel of Verismo (Giovanni Verga and Federico De Roberto)4. National and Genealogical Crisis: The Spanish Realist Novel (Benito Pérez Galdós)5. Nature, Nation, and De-/Regeneration: The Spanish Regional Novel (Emilia Pardo Bazán)6. Dissolution and Disillusion: The Novel of Portuguese Decline (Eça de Queirós)7. Surface Change: A Brazilian Novel and the Problem of Historical Representation (Machado de Assis)8. The Last of the Line: Foretold Decline in the Twentieth- Century Estate Novel (José Lins do Rego)9. Death of a Prince, Birth of a Nation: Time, Place, and Modernity in a Sicilian Historical Novel (G. Tomasi di Lampedusa)10. Epilogue: The Perspective from the EndNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisWritten in an accessible narrative style, The Afterlife of Little Women speaks to scholars, librarians, and devoted Alcott fans.Trade ReviewEven as new Alcott-oriented scholarship, adaptations, and other artifacts appear, The Afterlife of 'Little Women' will continue to be essential to Alcott studies and a model for reception scholars. Reception The research in this book is stunning both in its breadth and depth... This is a book that not only does justice to its subject through a detailed presentation of evidence connected by astute critical judgments, but can also serve as a model for future studies. We are in Clark's debt for this immensely detailed, informative, and--yes--entertaining work. The Lion and the Unicorn [ The Afterlife of Little Women] is fascinating, cover-to-cover, for the many readers of Little Women still out there, whether scholar or generally interested fan, for Clark's prose is clear and lively; her ability to discuss so many diverse materials so cogently is admirable... As the sesquicentennial of Alcott's most famous work approaches (2018), scholars and general readers can only hope that Beverly Lyon Clark will be among those assessing this classic in its 150th year. Studies in the Novel From the child who saves her copy of Little Women as she flees from a Chicago fire, to a schoolgirl who warns Alcott that if she didn't 'make Laurie marry Beth' she would 'never read another of your books as long as I live'... the glimpses we get of child readers in the nineteenth century are compelling. Journal of the History of Childhood and YouthTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Becoming Everyone's Aunt, 1868–19002. Waxing Nostalgic, 1900–19303. Outwitting Poverty and War, 1930–19604. Celebrating Sisterhood and Passion since 1960NotesIndex

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Book SynopsisAlong the way, he touches upon a wide range of topics that fascinated people of the day, including the journey to the source of the Nile and ideas about the origin of language.Table of ContentsPrefacePart I: Emerson, Thoreau, and WhitmanChapter 1. Champollion and the Historical Background; Emerson's Hieroglyphical EmblemsChapter 2. Thoreau: The Single, Basic Form — Patenting a LeafChapter 3. Whitman: Hieroglyphic Bibles and Phallic SongsPart II: PoeChapter 4. The Hieroglyphics and the Quest for Origins: The Myth of Hieroglyphic DoublingChapter 5. Ends and Origins: The Voyage to the Polar Abyss and the Journey to the Source of the Nile; The Survival of the ManuscriptChapter 6. Certainty and Credibility — Self-Evidence and Self-Reference; Nietzsche and Tragedy — Whitman and Opera; The Open RoadChapter 7. Writing Self / Written Self; The Dark Double; The Overwhelming of the Vessel Chapter 8. Cannibalism and Sacrifice; Metaphors of the Body — Transfiguration, Transubstantiation, Resurrection, and AscensionChapter 9. Narcissus and the Illusion of DepthChapter 10. Self-Recognition; Deciphering a Mnemic Inscription; Historical Amnesia and Personal AnamnesisChapter 11. Repetition; Symbolic Death and Rebirth; The Infinite and Indefinite; The Mechanism of ForeshadowingChapter 12. The Unfinished Narrative; The Cavern Inscription on Tsalal; Survival in an ImageChapter 13. The White Shadow; Imaging the Indefinite; Reading the Spirit from the Letter; The Finality of Revenge; The Alogical Status of the SelfChapter 14. The Return to Oneness; Breaking the Crypt; The Limits of Interpretation; The Ultimate CertaintyPart III: Hawthorne and MelvilleChapter 15. Hawthorne: The Ambiguity of the Hieroglyphics; The Unstable Self and Its Roles; Mirror Image and Phonetic Veil; The Feminine Role of the Artist; Veil and Phallus; The Book as Partial ObjectChapter 16. Melville: The Indeterminate Ground; A Conjunction of Fountain and Vortex; The Myth of Isis and Osiris; Master Oppositions; The Doubleness of the Self and the Illusion of Consistent Character; Dionysus and Apollo; Mask and Phallus; The Chain of Partial ObjectsEpilogueNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA ground-breaking study of nineteenth-century British colonial poetry.Imagined Homelands chronicles the emerging cultures of nineteenth-century British settler colonialism, focusing on poetry as a genre especially equipped to reflect colonial experience. Jason Rudy argues that the poetry of Victorian-era Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canadaoften disparaged as derivative and uncouthshould instead be seen as vitally engaged in the social and political work of settlement. The book illuminates cultural pressures that accompanied the unprecedented growth of British emigration across the nineteenth century. It also explores the role of poetry as a mediator between familiar British ideals and new colonial paradigms within emerging literary markets from Sydney and Melbourne to Cape Town and Halifax. Rudy focuses on the work of poets both canonicalincluding Tennyson, Browning, Longfellow, and Hemansand relatively obscure, from Adam Lindsay Gordon, SusaTrade ReviewDrawing on extensive archival work on four continents, Rudy’s vibrant investigative study moves deftly among the colonial poetries of Australia, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand, with particular emphasis on the first two, and finds fascinating examples of direct copying, echoic referencing and inventive reconstruction of British verse techniques in such diverse media as shipboard newspapers, colonial anthologies, exhibition performances and individual collections.—Times Higher EducationWriting with erudition and depth and in an engaging, accessible style, Rudy brings poets such as Australian Henry Kendall and Canadian Isabella Valancy Crawford, long dismissed by "commonplace assumptions about colonial derivativeness” (chapter 1), into world literature.—ChoiceImagined Homelands presents a compelling reappraisal of nineteenth-century colonial poetry . . . [Rudy's] vision of colonial poetry as a simultaneously migratory and emotionally tethering form is itself appealingly poetic . . . Imagined Homelands has much to offer readers with an interest in form and affect as well as to scholars with specific interests in nineteenth-century colonial culture. The book's exploration of the relationship between poetry and feeling in colonial contexts combines impressive academic rigour with an appealing emotional resonance of its own.—Jude Piesse, Liverpool John Moores University, Literature and HistoryTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Floating Worlds2. Colonial Authenticity3. Sounding Colonial4. Native Poetry5. Colonial Laureates6. The Poetry of Greater BritainConclusionAppendix AAppendix BNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisHow did the Victorians think about love and desire?Reader, I married him, Jane Eyre famously says of her beloved Mr. Rochester near the end of Charlotte Brontë's novel. But why does she do it, we might logically ask, after all he's put her through? The Victorian realist novel privileges the marriage plot, in which love and desire are represented as formative social experiences. Yet how novelists depict their characters reasoning about that erotic desiremaking something intelligible and ethically meaningful out of the aspect of interior life that would seem most essentially embodied, singular, and nonlinguisticremains a difficult question. In Bad Logic, Daniel Wright addresses this paradox, investigating how the Victorian novel represented reasoning about desire without diluting its intensity or making it mechanical. Connecting problems of sexuality to questions of logic and language, Wright posits that forms of reasoning that seem fuzzy, opaque, difficult, or simply bad can function Trade ReviewIt is this attention to erotic energies and their struggle for articulacy that makes Bad Logic such a compelling intervention into a number of current debates in Victorian studies, and a striking declaration of fiction's wider philosophical exigency.—Times Higher EducationDeploying a confident command of philosophical logic alongside an ear well attuned to moments of textual vulnerability, Wright offers a compelling account of the ways we twist the language of reason when "we're called up to make our erotic impulses intelligible to others or to ourselves" . . . Bad Logic is, at its core, a book of deep generosity. Where I had often seen stammer and bluster, or overly pat aphorism, Wright hears searching, and sacred, attempts to communicate. Beyond just offering readings, Bad Logic teaches how to listen . . . Bad Logic has given me a vocabulary for describing the ways in which the language of novels work when they are at their most tenuous and vulnerable.—Jesse Rosenthal, Johns Hopkins University, Victorian StudiesTable of ContentsAcknolwedgementsTo Give a Form to Formless Things1. Charlotte Brontë’s Contradictions2. Anthony Trollope’s Tautologies3. George Eliot’s Vagueness4. Henry James’s GeneralityQueer Fiction and The LawNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisOriginally published in 1966. In his lifetime, Gerard Manley Hopkins was known as a poet only by a small circle of his friends. More than any other major Victorian writer, he was recovered and presented as a poet to modern readers by editors and scholars of the first half of the twentieth century. This book analyzes how and to what extent the presuppositions of these critics have dictated the modern conception of Hopkins's work. Bender seeks to dispel, once and for all, the notion that Hopkins was a naif poet. He provides an analysis of classical Greek and Latin rhetoric relative to the classical background of Hopkins's style and the structure in his poetry. He maintains that especially in Hopkins's more extreme work, such as The Wreck of the Deutschland, there are precedents for the structure of the poem itself, the structure of the sentences within the poem, and its sensual and obscure imagery in the classical literature that Hopkins knew so well. Bender's study suggests two highlyTable of ContentsPrefaceIntroduction Chapter 1. The Critical Response to the First and Second Editions of the PoemsChapter 2. The Publication of the Prose and a Note on the Unpublished NotebooksChapter 3. The Non-Logical Structure of "The Wreck of the Deutschland": Hopkins and PindarChapter 4. Non-Logical Syntax: Latin and Greek HyperbatonChapter 5. Metaphysical Imagery and Explosive Meaning: Crashaw, Hopkins, and MartialIndex

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Book SynopsisA reimagining of how the aesthetic movement of the Victorian era ushered in modern queer theory. Late Victorian aesthetes were dedicated to the belief that an artwork's value derived solely from its beauty, rather than any moral or utilitarian purpose. Works by these queer artists have rarely been taken seriously as contributions to the theories of sexuality or aesthetics. But in Before Queer Theory, Dustin Friedman argues that aestheticism deploys its art for art's sake rhetoric to establish a nascent sense of sexual identity and community. Friedman makes the case for a claim rarely articulated in either Victorian or modern culture: that intellectually, creatively, and ethically, being queer can be an advantage not in spite but because of social hostility toward nonnormative desires. Showing how aesthetesamong them Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, and Michael Fieldharnessed the force that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel called the negative, Friedman reveals how becoming self-aTrade ReviewFriedman meticulously delineates a queer aestheticist tradition distinct from earlier queer theory and anticipates what may become the aesthetic turn of queer theory.—Tara Thomas, Papers on Language and LiteratureTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction 1. Homoerotic Subjectivity in Walter Pater's Early Essays 2. Styles of Survival in Pater's Later Writings 3. Oscar Wilde's Lyric Performativity 4. Vernon Lee and the Specter of Lesbian History 5. Queering Indifference in Michael Field's Ekphrastic Poetry Coda Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisAn ambitious comparative study of British and Latin American literature produced across a century of economic colonization. Winner of the Sonya Rudikoff Prize by the Northeast Victorian Studies AssociationSpanish colonization of Latin America came to an end in the early nineteenth century as, one by one, countries from Bolivia to Chile declared their independence. But soon another empire exerted control over the region through markets and trade dealingsBritain. Merchants, developers, and politicians seized on the opportunity to bring the newly independent nations under the sway of British financial power, subjecting them to an informal empire that lasted into the twentieth century. In The Forms of Informal Empire, Jessie Reeder reveals that this economic imperial control was founded on an audacious conceptual paradox: that Latin America should simultaneously be both free and unfree. As a result, two of the most important narrative tropes of empireprogress and familygrew strained undeTrade ReviewThe history of the informal British empire as recounted by Jessie Reeder is an exciting narration of the intense, complex and original work of persuasion – and self-persuasion – vis-à-vis the possibility that Latin America could be both free and dependent, a persuasion which involved all the main actors, albeit in different ways.—Laura Fotia, Journal of European Economic History Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. Freedom and Empire in the Nineteenth CenturyPart I. Progress and Informal Empire, 1808-1875: Sequence, Protagonist, ParadoxChapter 1. (In)dependence: Simón Bolívar and Revolutionary Forms of ProgressChapter 2. "Dependant Kings": Anna Barbauld and a Paradox DeterredChapter 3. Anthony Trollope and the Collapse of Historical TelosPart II. Family and Informal Empire, 1840-1926: Origin, Generation, Relation, HybridityChapter 4. Vicente Fidel López Re-members the NationChapter 5. H. Rider Haggard and the Antagonism of Valid FiancéesChapter 6. Where Progress and Family (Almost) Meet: William Henry Hudson and the Industrialization of the PampasCodaNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisAn ambitious comparative study of British and Latin American literature produced across a century of economic colonization. Winner of the Sonya Rudikoff Prize by the Northeast Victorian Studies AssociationSpanish colonization of Latin America came to an end in the early nineteenth century as, one by one, countries from Bolivia to Chile declared their independence. But soon another empire exerted control over the region through markets and trade dealingsBritain. Merchants, developers, and politicians seized on the opportunity to bring the newly independent nations under the sway of British financial power, subjecting them to an informal empire that lasted into the twentieth century. In The Forms of Informal Empire, Jessie Reeder reveals that this economic imperial control was founded on an audacious conceptual paradox: that Latin America should simultaneously be both free and unfree. As a result, two of the most important narrative tropes of empireprogress and familygrew strained undeTrade ReviewThe history of the informal British empire as recounted by Jessie Reeder is an exciting narration of the intense, complex and original work of persuasion – and self-persuasion – vis-à-vis the possibility that Latin America could be both free and dependent, a persuasion which involved all the main actors, albeit in different ways.—Laura Fotia, Journal of European Economic History Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. Freedom and Empire in the Nineteenth CenturyPart I. Progress and Informal Empire, 1808-1875: Sequence, Protagonist, ParadoxChapter 1. (In)dependence: Simón Bolívar and Revolutionary Forms of ProgressChapter 2. "Dependant Kings": Anna Barbauld and a Paradox DeterredChapter 3. Anthony Trollope and the Collapse of Historical TelosPart II. Family and Informal Empire, 1840-1926: Origin, Generation, Relation, HybridityChapter 4. Vicente Fidel López Re-members the NationChapter 5. H. Rider Haggard and the Antagonism of Valid FiancéesChapter 6. Where Progress and Family (Almost) Meet: William Henry Hudson and the Industrialization of the PampasCodaNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisTo develop a theory of world literature, this book demands that the theory of the novel can no longer ignore literary forms other than realism. Winner of the Donald Murphy Prize for a Distinguished First Book by the American Conference on Irish Studies, and the Waclaw Lednicki Award in the Humanities by the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of AmericaFor centuries, the standard account of the development of the novel focused on the rise of realism in English literature. Studies of early novels connected the form to various aspects of British life across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the burgeoning middle class, the growth of individualism, and the emergence of democracy and the nation-state. But as the push for teaching and learning global literature grows, this narrative is insufficient for studying novel forms outside of a predominately English-speaking British and American realm. In Estranging the Novel, Katarzyna Bartoszynska explores how the emergence Trade Review[Bartoszynska] uses an impressively wide-ranging analytic toolkit in her readings with recurring tropes such as metafictionality, irony, ekphrasis, temporality, the role of prefaces and footnotes....Not only does her book estrange the idea of the novel, but it also makes us think about the ruts we are stuck in when approaching literary works from different traditions.—Kasia Szymanska, Literature and HistoryFor the researcher, the way this book continually presses against insufficient accounts of the novel is invigorating. So too, the close readings are clearly written by a scholar who loves the capacities of fiction in all their complexity. As a scholar and reader, for me this book's biggest payoff was its sustained discussion of worlding—specifically, via Eric Hayot, of the ways that occluded complexities of fiction bring new possibilities of thought into being.—Daniel Dewispelare, Studies in the NovelThe wider implication of the analysis in Estranging the Novel is that we need an account of novels which are 'anomalous or strange' that considers their strangeness on its own terms rather than how it accords with or departs from a single history of the nove...l. [Bartoszynska] provides a compelling call for a new way of thinking about the novel's history and form, and the role of peripheral literatures within it.—Modern Language ReviewEstranging the Novel is a highly original attempt to offer an alternative method for the study of the novel by juxtaposing texts derived from Polish and Irish novelistic traditions.—Eighteenth-Century FictionThis book would be an important contribution to novel studies for the novels it studies alone....Reading this book not only helped me realize what I miss in knowing so little about Polish literature and not being able to read the Polish language, but it also helped me speculate about all the other things I did not know about novels and world literature.—Novel: A Forum on FictionBartoszynska's book is overall a lucid and captivating study...Estranging the Novel will reward readers who are searching for a thoughtful conversation with the most recent updates in theories of world literature.—Genre...convincing and extremely interesting.—Slavic ReviewTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Unreal Histories1. The Problem with Happily Ever After: Swift and Krasicki2. The Terror of Worlds Unfolding: Potocki and Maturin3. Queer Tales and Seductive Paintings: Zmichowska and Wilde4. Impossibly Free: Gombrowicz and BeckettConclusion: Toward a "Weak" Theory of the Novel Notes

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Book SynopsisTo develop a theory of world literature, this book demands that the theory of the novel can no longer ignore literary forms other than realism. Winner of the Donald Murphy Prize for a Distinguished First Book by the American Conference on Irish Studies, and the Waclaw Lednicki Award in the Humanities by the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of AmericaFor centuries, the standard account of the development of the novel focused on the rise of realism in English literature. Studies of early novels connected the form to various aspects of British life across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the burgeoning middle class, the growth of individualism, and the emergence of democracy and the nation-state. But as the push for teaching and learning global literature grows, this narrative is insufficient for studying novel forms outside of a predominately English-speaking British and American realm. In Estranging the Novel, Katarzyna Bartoszynska explores how the emergence Trade Review[Bartoszynska] uses an impressively wide-ranging analytic toolkit in her readings with recurring tropes such as metafictionality, irony, ekphrasis, temporality, the role of prefaces and footnotes....Not only does her book estrange the idea of the novel, but it also makes us think about the ruts we are stuck in when approaching literary works from different traditions.—Kasia Szymanska, Literature and HistoryFor the researcher, the way this book continually presses against insufficient accounts of the novel is invigorating. So too, the close readings are clearly written by a scholar who loves the capacities of fiction in all their complexity. As a scholar and reader, for me this book's biggest payoff was its sustained discussion of worlding—specifically, via Eric Hayot, of the ways that occluded complexities of fiction bring new possibilities of thought into being.—Daniel Dewispelare, Studies in the NovelThe wider implication of the analysis in Estranging the Novel is that we need an account of novels which are 'anomalous or strange' that considers their strangeness on its own terms rather than how it accords with or departs from a single history of the nove...l. [Bartoszynska] provides a compelling call for a new way of thinking about the novel's history and form, and the role of peripheral literatures within it.—Modern Language ReviewEstranging the Novel is a highly original attempt to offer an alternative method for the study of the novel by juxtaposing texts derived from Polish and Irish novelistic traditions.—Eighteenth-Century FictionThis book would be an important contribution to novel studies for the novels it studies alone....Reading this book not only helped me realize what I miss in knowing so little about Polish literature and not being able to read the Polish language, but it also helped me speculate about all the other things I did not know about novels and world literature.—Novel: A Forum on FictionBartoszynska's book is overall a lucid and captivating study...Estranging the Novel will reward readers who are searching for a thoughtful conversation with the most recent updates in theories of world literature.—Genre...convincing and extremely interesting.—Slavic ReviewTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Unreal Histories1. The Problem with Happily Ever After: Swift and Krasicki2. The Terror of Worlds Unfolding: Potocki and Maturin3. Queer Tales and Seductive Paintings: Zmichowska and Wilde4. Impossibly Free: Gombrowicz and BeckettConclusion: Toward a "Weak" Theory of the Novel Notes

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Book SynopsisWhat the Victorian history of self-help reveals about the myth of individualism. Stories of hardworking characters who lift themselves from rags to riches abound in the Victorian era. From the popularity of such stories, it is clear that the Victorians valorized personal ambition in ways that previous generations had not. In Material Ambitions, Rebecca Richardson explores this phenomenon in light of the under-studied reception history of Samuel Smiles's 1859 publication, Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance. A compilation of vignettes about captains of industry, artists, and inventors who persevered through failure and worked tirelessly to achieve success in their respective fields, Self-Help links individual ambition to the growth of the nation. Contextualizing Smiles's work in a tradition of Renaissance self-fashioning, eighteenth-century advice books, and inspirational biography, Richardson argues that the burgeoning self-help genre of the VictoriaTrade ReviewRebecca Richardson shows that even those writers who appear to celebrate self-help invite more nuanced readings. They explored the ways in which aspiration encourages not only ambition but competition, and often exploitation – inequities, as declared by Richardson in a brief polemical coda, that persist today.—Times Literary SupplementTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Self-Help and the Story of the Ambitious Individual1. Forming the Ambitious Individual in Samuel Smiles's Self-Help2. Expanding the Story of Ambition, Work, and Health in a Limited World: Harriet Martineau's Economic and Illness Writing3. Enabling the Self-Help Narrative in Dinah Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman4. "At What Point This Ambition Transgresses the Boundary of Virtue": From Thackeray's Barry Lyndon to Vanity Fair5. Individuating Ambitions in a Competitive System: Trollope's Autobiography and The Three Clerks6. Placing and Displacing Ambition: Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career and My Career Goes BungCodaNotes BibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisThe first book to analyse cultural dynamics of Chinese migration to Italy, Migration and the Media compares Italian, Chinese migrant, and international media interpretations between 1992 and 2012. From paternalistic tones reducing migrants'' motives to poverty or political oppression to fear-mongering diatribes about illegal business practices, tax evasion, and unfair competition, the Italian and international media covered this large-scale migration extensively during this period. The Chinese community also joined in the media polyphony with articles in their own newspapers and magazines, more likely refuting biased mainstream media coverage or protesting the harsh regulations that seemed to target the Chinese, but sometimes even advising fellow migrants on how to counter the media''s criticism. Gaoheng Zhang places the strong media interest in Italian-Chinese migrant relations within relevant economic, political, cultural, and linguistic contexts. Examining how jourTrade Review"The major contribution of this manuscript lies in its insistence on the role of the media in giving voice to tensions in society created by successful immigrant communities such as the Chinese. By commenting upon these points of friction, the book offers a road map for the study of representations of other immigrant cultures. Zhang’s use of the case study model is highly effective, and indeed may be applicable for teaching and writing about other immigrant experiences." -- Mary Ann McDonald Carolan * Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies *"Zhang Gaoheng’s Migration and the Media is a tremendous contribution to the fields of media, cultural, migration and Chinese studies and will undoubtedly appeal to advanced undergraduates, graduate students and scholars in these fields. This book emphatically reminds us that while structural variables such as demographic shifts and economic restructuring do indeed matter, so too do words and images. In this way, Zhang has not only filled in major gaps in our understanding of the Chinese migration experience to Italy, but also helped us reassess what we thought we already knew." -- Calvin Chen * The China Quarterly Review *"Gaoheng Zhang’s study is scientifically solid and innovative, and can be useful to anyone interested in various levels of Europe-China relations, media studies, migration and ethnic studies, Italian or Chinese studies and cultural studies in general. His work paves the way for other studies that analyse migration from a distinctly cultural viewpoint, and is a milestone in this genre." -- Valentina Pedone * Forum Italicum *"Zhang’s careful analysis, aided by his linguistic skills, which gave him access to sources in three languages, together with his interdisciplinary approach, leads to a ‘journey’ in the Italian-Chinese migrant repertoire theorized by Zhang that is fascinating and intriguing." -- Miriam Castorina, Università degli Studi di Firenze * Journal of Asian Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction 1. Chinese Migration to Italy, Globalization, and the News Media 2. The "Chinese Mafia" in Italy, 1992–2006 3. Milan: The 2007 "Chinatown" Riot in Italian Debates 4. Milan: The 2007 "Chinatown" Riot in Migrant Debates 5. Prato: Local Debates on "Made in Italy" by the Chinese, 2005–2012 6. Prato: Global Debates on "Made in Italy" by the Chinese, 2005–2012 7. Rome: The 2012 Chinese March Conclusion Coda

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Book SynopsisThis book is a comparative examination of the second generation children of immigrants in black Canadian and black British women’s writing that dialogues with black diaspora and postcolonial theory, feminist and social geography, and cultural studies.Trade Review"Particularly valuable in Medovarski’s work is her conceptualization of the second generation in terms of its expansion of the "conditions of possibility" (a concept borrowed from Michel de Certeau). In other words, Medovarski conceives of the second generation not just as a resistant force, but instead as a transformative one that can work to "remake citizenship on other, more ethical or more inclusive terms" and thereby create nations that are "‘more’ than they currently are." Medovarski takes her cue from a wonderful selection of texts, intervening nicely into already established discourses surrounding some of the more well-known texts." -- Veronica Austen * Canadian Literature, August 2020 *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction. “Settling Down and Settling Up”: Conceptualizing the Second Generation 1. “A Kind of New Vocabulary”: Dionne Brand’s (Re)Mappings in What We All Long For 2. “Belonging Is What You Give Yourself”: Tessa McWatt’s Out of My Skin 3. “I Knew This Was England”: Myths of “Back Home” in Andrea Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon 4. “The Abuses of Settlement”: Esi Edugyan’s The Second Life of Samuel Tyne 5. “When Roots Won’t Matter Anymore”: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth Conclusion: “Conditions of Possibility” Notes Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisPost-Unification Italy saw an unprecedented rise of the middle classes, an expansion in the production of print culture, and increased access to education and professions for women, particularly in urban areas. Although there was still widespread illiteracy, especially among women in both rural and urban areas, there emerged a generation of women writers whose domestic fiction and journalism addressed a growing female readership. This study looks at the work of three of the most significant women writers of the period: La Marchesa Colombi, Neera, and Matilde Serao. These writers, whose works had been largely forgotten for much of the last century, only to be rediscovered by the Italian feminist movement of the 1970s, were widely read and received considerable critical acclaim in their day. In their realist fiction and journalism, these professional women writers documented and brought to light the ways in which women participated in everyday life in the newly independent Italy, and Trade Review'Mitchell's book remains a valuable addition to the scholarship on Italian women writers for the issues raised and their well-articulated discussion.' -- Ioana Raluca Larco English Studies in Canada vol 41:03:2015 'Mitchell's study is a scholarly work of undoubted value... This volume will not only appeal to scholars of Italian studies but also of women's writing and women's studies in general.' -- Tristana Rorandelli SHARP News August 21, 2016 'In this groundbreaking study, Mitchell analyzes some domestic fiction and some non-fiction pieces - especially journalism and essays - of three middleclass Italian women who were professionally active between 1870 and 1910.' -- C. De Santi Choice Magazine, vol 52:02:2015 Katharine Mitchell offers an invaluable, comprehensive assessment of three pivotal nineteenth-century writers whose works were largely unstudied until the 1970s: La Marchesa Colombi Neera, and Matilde Serao.' -- Monica Streifer Modern Language Review vol 111:04:2016Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Preface Introduction: Culture, gender, and the everyday in the new Italy Chapter One: Italian Domestic Fiction, its Readers, and Writers Chapter Two: Journalism, Essays, Conduct Books Chapter Three: Gendering Private and Public Spheres Chapter Four: Freeing Negative Emotions Chapter Five: Female Friendships, Sibling Relationships, Mother-Daughter Bonds Conclusion Appendix Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisExamining modern jurisprudence theory, statutory law, and the family within the modern Gothic novel, Anne Quéma shows how the forms and effects of political power transform as one shifts from discourse to discourse.Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Symbolic Power and Legitimacy 2. Social Poiesis and Symbolic Power 3. Law's Symbolic Power to Legitimize 4. Symbolic Violence and Illegitimacy: The Political Uncanny 5. The Symbolic Power and Violence of Legal Utterances 6. The Legitimacy of the Family: Family Law and Gothic Fiction 7. The Political Uncanny of the Family: Patricia Duncker's The Deadly Space Between and The Civil Partnership Act 2004 8. Legitimizing the Subject of Domestic Violence: Lesley Glaister's Honour Thy Father and Laws of the Household 9. Resistance and Legitimacy 10. Making the Law

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Book SynopsisHester Blum examines the rich, offbeat collection of printed ephemera created by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century polar explorers, showing how ship newspapers and other writing shows how explores wrestled with questions of time, space, and community while providing them with habits to survive the extreme polar climate.Trade Review"The News at the Ends of the Earth is a fine-grained register of the ebb and flow of a printophilic century, from Ross to Shackleton. While mindful of the minor variations over the decades, Blum marvelously conveys that fantastic, phantasmatically preserved shipbound conversation, a dilated and heterogeneous house party." -- John Plotz * Public Books *"An intricately layered, richly illustrated examination of shipboard newspapers (printed and handwritten), playbills, and other media produced by expeditions to the Antarctic and Arctic regions between 1818 and 1914. . . . The book speaks to the human imperative to communicate, even under extremely hostile conditions. . . . Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." -- J. Bekken * Choice *"Superb. . . . As the Anthropocene continues to develop, Blum’s concern with the media and narratives we might use to represent the planet’s predicament is of interest not only to scholars of printing and the polar regions, but also to a general reader." -- Nancy Campbell * TLS *"Blum’s book is a lively and enjoyable account of a fascinating historical period and its practices—but it is also vitally relevant for our current moment." -- Carie Lyn Schneider * Edge Effects *"[Blum] offers a fascinating history of onboard polar publication and provides a detailed analysis of the various textual materials produced during voyages of Arctic and Antarctic exploration. It also strives to unpick the intriguing motivations that lay behind their production. ... An invaluable contribution to several branches of scholarship, and readers interested in polar exploration, literary studies, and histories of printing culture will gain much from reading this interesting and insightful book." -- Peter R. Martin * Nineteenth Century Studies *"The News at the Ends of the Earth makes a significant contribution to the growing push to incorporate the polar regions into world histories. It would be of immense value to historians with an interest in oceanic spaces, the polar regions, histories of printed media, or histories of ephemera, and would be a useful starting point for scholars looking to think about how the Arctic and Antarctic fit into the scope of world history." -- Rohan Howitt * Journal of World History *"The News at the Ends of the Earth is exciting, both for what it definitively argues and for the questions it incites." -- Devin M. Garofalo * Journal of American Studies *"The News at the Ends of the Earth offers a fascinating, finely textured portrait of life aboard ship in the most extreme environments of the world." -- Michael Robinson * Journal of American History *“The News at the Ends of the Earth succeeds in its assertion that the practices of historical polar expeditions are important in comprehending the current climate crisis. The reader is left with an overwhelming sense of how crucial the enterprise of creating these collective outlets of communication was, and still is, in understanding one’s place in the environment and the necessity of self-expression in climatic extremes.” -- Eavan O’Dochartaigh * Journal for Maritime Research *“Hester Blum’s The News at the Ends of the Earth is deeply detailed and richly illustrated in order to create a book that is at once informative and culturally important.” -- Emily Ennis * Victoriographies *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations vii Chronology xi Preface: Books on Ice xv Acknowledgments xxi Introduction. Polar Ecomedia 1 1. Extreme Printing 43 2. Arctic News 91 3. Antarctic Imprints 138 4. Dead Letter Reckoning 177 5. Inuit Knowledge and Charles Francis Hall 209 Conclusion. Matters of Life and Death 231 Notes 237 Bibliography 273 Index 291

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Book SynopsisHester Blum examines the rich, offbeat collection of printed ephemera created by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century polar explorers, showing how ship newspapers and other writing shows how explores wrestled with questions of time, space, and community while providing them with habits to survive the extreme polar climate.Trade Review"The News at the Ends of the Earth is a fine-grained register of the ebb and flow of a printophilic century, from Ross to Shackleton. While mindful of the minor variations over the decades, Blum marvelously conveys that fantastic, phantasmatically preserved shipbound conversation, a dilated and heterogeneous house party." -- John Plotz * Public Books *"An intricately layered, richly illustrated examination of shipboard newspapers (printed and handwritten), playbills, and other media produced by expeditions to the Antarctic and Arctic regions between 1818 and 1914. . . . The book speaks to the human imperative to communicate, even under extremely hostile conditions. . . . Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." -- J. Bekken * Choice *"Superb. . . . As the Anthropocene continues to develop, Blum’s concern with the media and narratives we might use to represent the planet’s predicament is of interest not only to scholars of printing and the polar regions, but also to a general reader." -- Nancy Campbell * TLS *"Blum’s book is a lively and enjoyable account of a fascinating historical period and its practices—but it is also vitally relevant for our current moment." -- Carie Lyn Schneider * Edge Effects *"[Blum] offers a fascinating history of onboard polar publication and provides a detailed analysis of the various textual materials produced during voyages of Arctic and Antarctic exploration. It also strives to unpick the intriguing motivations that lay behind their production. ... An invaluable contribution to several branches of scholarship, and readers interested in polar exploration, literary studies, and histories of printing culture will gain much from reading this interesting and insightful book." -- Peter R. Martin * Nineteenth Century Studies *"The News at the Ends of the Earth makes a significant contribution to the growing push to incorporate the polar regions into world histories. It would be of immense value to historians with an interest in oceanic spaces, the polar regions, histories of printed media, or histories of ephemera, and would be a useful starting point for scholars looking to think about how the Arctic and Antarctic fit into the scope of world history." -- Rohan Howitt * Journal of World History *"The News at the Ends of the Earth is exciting, both for what it definitively argues and for the questions it incites." -- Devin M. Garofalo * Journal of American Studies *"The News at the Ends of the Earth offers a fascinating, finely textured portrait of life aboard ship in the most extreme environments of the world." -- Michael Robinson * Journal of American History *“The News at the Ends of the Earth succeeds in its assertion that the practices of historical polar expeditions are important in comprehending the current climate crisis. The reader is left with an overwhelming sense of how crucial the enterprise of creating these collective outlets of communication was, and still is, in understanding one’s place in the environment and the necessity of self-expression in climatic extremes.” -- Eavan O’Dochartaigh * Journal for Maritime Research *“Hester Blum’s The News at the Ends of the Earth is deeply detailed and richly illustrated in order to create a book that is at once informative and culturally important.” -- Emily Ennis * Victoriographies *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations vii Chronology xi Preface: Books on Ice xv Acknowledgments xxi Introduction. Polar Ecomedia 1 1. Extreme Printing 43 2. Arctic News 91 3. Antarctic Imprints 138 4. Dead Letter Reckoning 177 5. Inuit Knowledge and Charles Francis Hall 209 Conclusion. Matters of Life and Death 231 Notes 237 Bibliography 273 Index 291

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Book SynopsisElizabeth Freeman expands bipolitical and queer theory by outlining a temporal view of the long nineteenth century and showing how time became a social and sensory means by which people resisted disciplinary regimes and assembled into groups in ways that created new forms of sociality.Trade Review“Beside You in Time is a singularly powerful meditation on the biopoliticized timing of bodies but also upon the carnal body as an instrument of sociability, a tool for fugitive world-making. Elizabeth Freeman takes discourses and scenes we thought we knew and, by locating them in a context so fresh in conception, brings them to a new dynamic life. Americanists, queer theorists, anybody interested in the state of critical theory after New Historicism: all will be eager to get hold of this field-shifting and necessary book.” -- Peter Coviello, author of * Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism *“Elizabeth Freeman's fierce femme provocation expands contemporary critical thinking about biopower, leading queer Americanist scholarship toward an exploration of the rich potentialities buried within the history of sexuality.” -- Dana Luciano, author of * Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America *"This book makes an important contribution to queer theory as well as to American literary and cultural studies in the long nineteenth century, as Elizabeth Freeman frames the field." -- Daniel T. O'Hara * Review 19 *"What I like most about Freeman’s Beside You in Time is its capacious sense of reading, along with the queer possibilities that inhere, for her, in all social encounters and interactions. The book is filled with insights on Freeman’s practice as a teacher and scholar. . . . Her close readings invite an intimate, associative interpretation that refreshes and surprises with its insights." -- Ben Bascom * American Literary History *“Freeman’s analytical imagination is on full display…. Beside You in Time helps us think differently about how bodies connect through time, through desire, through narrative (itself a chronological technology), and, most importantly, through contact with each other. She helps us reconsider our present moment as we are physically distanced but temporally together: on our computer screens and on the streets.” -- Sarah E. Chinn * Studies in the Novel *“Freeman is productively in conversation with cultural theorists of the last forty years, and she argues generously and generatively, adding nuance and worthy provocations.” -- Stephanie P. Browner * Modern Philology *“Beside You in Time . . . remind[s] us of the robust synergies between religious and queer studies, while suggesting how we might better understand the field’s long-standing emphasis on nonnormativity within rather than against histories of racist and colonial exclusions.” -- Travis M. Foster * GLQ *“When readers get into the close readings that make up the bulk of Freeman’s discussion, they will find that she is a lucid and illuminating literary interpreter.” -- Thomas Allen * Journal of American Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1. Shake it Off: The Physiopolitics of Shaker Dance, 1774–1856 27 2. The Gift of Constant Escape: Playing Dead in African American Literature, 1849–1900 52 3. Feeling Historicisms: Libidinal History in Twain and Hopkins 87 4. The Sense of Unending: Defective Chronicity in "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and "Melanctha" 124 5. Sacra/Mentality in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood 158 Coda. Rhythm Travel 187 Notes 191 References 199 Index 219

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Book SynopsisThis special issue interrogates the plantation as a form, logic, and technology that continues to produce inequalities. Attending to the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States, contributors follow the evolution of plantation slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through its subsequent iterations in the Jim Crow and civil rights eras, and into the neoliberal present, where the carceral state props up fantasies of postracialism. The contributors rethink the necro- and biopolitics of plantation slavery, uncovering laborers' strategies of self-determination, affiliation, and communication in spite of the plantation's mechanisms of control. Essay topics include the circulation of a weekly newspaper published by black tenant farmers in the 1920s, a nineteenth-century trial of an enslaved woman, and the fetish-making of Haitian revolutionary François Makandal. Reconsidering the time and space of the plantation, contributors analyze Western processes of racialization a

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Book SynopsisElizabeth Freeman expands bipolitical and queer theory by outlining a temporal view of the long nineteenth century and showing how time became a social and sensory means by which people resisted disciplinary regimes and assembled into groups in ways that created new forms of sociality.Trade Review“Beside You in Time is a singularly powerful meditation on the biopoliticized timing of bodies but also upon the carnal body as an instrument of sociability, a tool for fugitive world-making. Elizabeth Freeman takes discourses and scenes we thought we knew and, by locating them in a context so fresh in conception, brings them to a new dynamic life. Americanists, queer theorists, anybody interested in the state of critical theory after New Historicism: all will be eager to get hold of this field-shifting and necessary book.” -- Peter Coviello, author of * Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism *“Elizabeth Freeman's fierce femme provocation expands contemporary critical thinking about biopower, leading queer Americanist scholarship toward an exploration of the rich potentialities buried within the history of sexuality.” -- Dana Luciano, author of * Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America *"This book makes an important contribution to queer theory as well as to American literary and cultural studies in the long nineteenth century, as Elizabeth Freeman frames the field." -- Daniel T. O'Hara * Review 19 *"What I like most about Freeman’s Beside You in Time is its capacious sense of reading, along with the queer possibilities that inhere, for her, in all social encounters and interactions. The book is filled with insights on Freeman’s practice as a teacher and scholar. . . . Her close readings invite an intimate, associative interpretation that refreshes and surprises with its insights." -- Ben Bascom * American Literary History *“Freeman’s analytical imagination is on full display…. Beside You in Time helps us think differently about how bodies connect through time, through desire, through narrative (itself a chronological technology), and, most importantly, through contact with each other. She helps us reconsider our present moment as we are physically distanced but temporally together: on our computer screens and on the streets.” -- Sarah E. Chinn * Studies in the Novel *“Freeman is productively in conversation with cultural theorists of the last forty years, and she argues generously and generatively, adding nuance and worthy provocations.” -- Stephanie P. Browner * Modern Philology *“Beside You in Time . . . remind[s] us of the robust synergies between religious and queer studies, while suggesting how we might better understand the field’s long-standing emphasis on nonnormativity within rather than against histories of racist and colonial exclusions.” -- Travis M. Foster * GLQ *“When readers get into the close readings that make up the bulk of Freeman’s discussion, they will find that she is a lucid and illuminating literary interpreter.” -- Thomas Allen * Journal of American Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1. Shake it Off: The Physiopolitics of Shaker Dance, 1774–1856 27 2. The Gift of Constant Escape: Playing Dead in African American Literature, 1849–1900 52 3. Feeling Historicisms: Libidinal History in Twain and Hopkins 87 4. The Sense of Unending: Defective Chronicity in "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and "Melanctha" 124 5. Sacra/Mentality in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood 158 Coda. Rhythm Travel 187 Notes 191 References 199 Index 219

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Book SynopsisIn the 19th century, personhood was a term of regulation and discipline in which slaves, criminals, and others, could be made and unmade. Yet it was precisely the fraught, uncontainable nature of personhood that necessitated its constant legislation, wherein its meaning could be both contested and controlled.Examining scientific and literary narratives, Nihad M. Farooq's Undisciplined encourages an alternative consideration of personhood, one that emerges from evolutionary and ethnographic discourse. Moving chronologically from 1830 to 1940, Farooq explores the scientific and cultural entanglements of Atlantic travelers in and beyond the Darwin era, and invites us to attend more closely to the consequences of mobility and contact on disciplines and persons. Bringing together an innovative group of readingsfrom field journals, diaries, letters, and testimonies to novels, stage plays, and audio recordingsFarooq advocates for a reconsideration of science, personhood, and the prioTrade ReviewPersuasive and thought-provoking,Undisciplinedargues against overly simplistic accounts of the work of modern science in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With dazzling archival work, Nihad M. Farooq examines the sometimes-playful and often-sobering negotiations of those who were being studied as they returned the gaze ofand spoke backtotheir Western observers. Engaging with histories of slavery, colonialism, and diaspora, Farooq makes a compelling case for the centrality of race within the emergent sciences of evolutionary biology and anthropology. -- Jane Thrailkill,author of Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary RealismThis work would serve as a worthwhile addition to courses or reading lists on the history of science, anthropology, literature, and citizenship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. * Civil War Book Review *

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Book SynopsisPerhaps the most popular of all canonicalAmerican authors, Mark Twain is famous for creating works that satirizeAmerican formations of race and empire. While many scholars have exploredTwain's work in African Americanist contexts, his writing on Asia and AsianAmericans remains largely in the shadows. In Sitting in Darkness, Hsuan Hsuexamines Twain's career-long archive of writings about United States relationswith China and the Philippines. Comparing Twain's early writings about Chineseimmigrants in California and Nevada with his later fictions of slavery andanti-imperialist essays, he demonstrates that Twain's ideas about race were notlimited to white and black, but profoundly comparative as he carefully craftedassessments of racialization that drew connections between groups, includingAfrican Americans, Chinese immigrants, and a range of colonial populations.Drawing on recent legal scholarshiTrade ReviewA brilliant book that will add immeasurably to Mark Twain studies, American literary studies, and the field of comparative studies of race and ethnicity. Exciting, well-written, and filled with surprising, unexpected connections,Sitting in Darknesscontributes to our understanding of the history of comparative racialization in America while deftly placing literature in legal and social contexts that are truly illuminating. -- Shelley Fisher Fishkin,Professor of English and Director of American Studies, Stanford UniversityTable of ContentsContents List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction: "Coolies" and Comparative Racialization 1 in the Global West 1. "A Witness More Powerful than Himself ": Race, Testimony, 27 and Twain's Courtroom Farces 2. Vagrancy and Comparative Racialization in Huckleberry 53 Finn and "Three Vagabonds of Trinidad" 3. "Coolies" and Corporate Personhood in Those 83 Extraordinary Twins 4. A Connecticut Yankee in the Court of Wu Chih Tien: 109 Imperial Romance and Chinese Modernization 5. Body Counts and Comparative Anti-imperialism 139 Conclusion: Post-racial Twain? 167 Notes 171 Works Cited 209 Index 229 About the Author 244

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Book SynopsisHow worldwide plant circulation and new botanical ideas enabled Americans to radically re-envision politics and societyThe Garden Politic argues that botanical practices and discourses helped nineteenth-century Americans engage pressing questions of race, gender, settler colonialism, and liberal subjectivity. In the early republic, ideas of biotic distinctiveness helped fuel narratives of American exceptionalism. By the nineteenth century, however, these ideas and narratives were unsettled by the unprecedented scale at which the United States and European empires prospected for valuable plants and exchanged them across the globe. Drawing on ecocriticism, New Materialism, environmental history, and the history of scienceand crossing disciplinary and national boundariesThe Garden Politic shows how new ideas about cultivation and plant life could be mobilized to divergent political and social ends. Reading the work of influential nineteenth-century authTrade ReviewA superb contribution to American studies and more importantly, significantly advances and historicizes the material turn in the environmental humanities. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, The Garden Politic offers and indispensable genealogy of race, settler colonialism, and the materiality of an always-contested vision of nature. * Stephanie Foote, West Virginia University *Presents an original and carefully historicized account of influential nineteenth-century authors’ generative engagements with the transnational circulation of plants, from seed exchanges and horticultural periodicals to botanical textbooks. Kuhn makes a compelling case for rethinking familiar forms like sentimentalism, domestic fiction, and abolitionist literature through the interpretive frameworks of botanical science and critical plant studies. * Hsuan Hsu, author of The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics *Kuhn's elegantly crafted arguments represent a valuable addition to the burgeoning discipline of environmental humanities and aligns with the field of ecocriticism. It also reminds readers of the importance of imagination—works crafted within the humanities, and not just science or politics—to tackle the myriad global environmental challenges we face today. * E. G. Harrington, Universities at Shady Grove *

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Book SynopsisHow worldwide plant circulation and new botanical ideas enabled Americans to radically re-envision politics and societyThe Garden Politic argues that botanical practices and discourses helped nineteenth-century Americans engage pressing questions of race, gender, settler colonialism, and liberal subjectivity. In the early republic, ideas of biotic distinctiveness helped fuel narratives of American exceptionalism. By the nineteenth century, however, these ideas and narratives were unsettled by the unprecedented scale at which the United States and European empires prospected for valuable plants and exchanged them across the globe. Drawing on ecocriticism, New Materialism, environmental history, and the history of scienceand crossing disciplinary and national boundariesThe Garden Politic shows how new ideas about cultivation and plant life could be mobilized to divergent political and social ends. Reading the work of influential nineteenth-century authTrade ReviewA superb contribution to American studies and more importantly, significantly advances and historicizes the material turn in the environmental humanities. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, The Garden Politic offers and indispensable genealogy of race, settler colonialism, and the materiality of an always-contested vision of nature. * Stephanie Foote, West Virginia University *Presents an original and carefully historicized account of influential nineteenth-century authors’ generative engagements with the transnational circulation of plants, from seed exchanges and horticultural periodicals to botanical textbooks. Kuhn makes a compelling case for rethinking familiar forms like sentimentalism, domestic fiction, and abolitionist literature through the interpretive frameworks of botanical science and critical plant studies. * Hsuan Hsu, author of The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics *Kuhn's elegantly crafted arguments represent a valuable addition to the burgeoning discipline of environmental humanities and aligns with the field of ecocriticism. It also reminds readers of the importance of imagination—works crafted within the humanities, and not just science or politics—to tackle the myriad global environmental challenges we face today. * E. G. Harrington, Universities at Shady Grove *

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Book SynopsisA retelling of U.S., Latin American, and Latino/a literary history through writing by Latinos/as who lived in the United States during the long nineteenth centuryWritten by both established and emerging scholars, the essays in The Latino Nineteenth Century engage materials in Spanish and English and genres ranging from the newspaper to the novel, delving into new texts and areas of research as they shed light on well-known writers. This volume situates nineteenth-century Latino intellectuals and writers within crucial national, hemispheric, and regional debates. The Latino Nineteenth Century offers a long-overdue corrective to the Anglophone and nation-based emphasis of American literary history. Contributors track Latino/a lives and writing through routes that span Philadelphia to San Francisco and roots that extend deeply into Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South Americas, and Spain. Readers will find in the rich heterogeneity of texts and authorTrade ReviewThe collections expansion of American literary history is also evident in the inclusion of Central American textualities, which have been overlooked in most fields of study. In sum, the 15 essays Lazo and Aleman bring together offer new frameworks to better understand and examine 19th-century Latina/o hemispheric movements. * Choice *The Latino Nineteenth Century builds on the past two decades of Latina/o scholarship that focuses on historicizing the place of Latina/os in the United States. The book thus excavates the history of Latina/os in seemingly unlikely regions such as New England and cities such as Philadelphia. Further, it illuminates the need to examine Spanish language texts rather than relying on works in English. Expanding the corpus of materials in this way also sheds light on the longer literary histories of Latina/o literature rather than relying on periodizations that ground Latina/o literature in the social movements of the mid-twentieth century. As The Latino Nineteenth Century reminds us, Latina/os existed in the United States well before the Chicano Movement. Further, to fully grasp the range of Latina/o experiences in the United States, several essays in this collection point to the necessity of examining US-Latin American relations. An impressive anthology that demonstrates the diversity and vitality of this period, The Latino Nineteenth Century makes necessary interventions into nineteenth-century American Studies, Latina/o Studies, and Latin American Studies. * MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States *The nineteenth-century in the context of the extraordinary triangle presented here of Latina and Latino writers and intellectuals in the United States, Latin America, and the transatlantic may come to us in fragments, but what a marvel it is to bring together this dazzling constellation of scholars who highlight the historical dimensions of 'the Latino/a' and speak to the concurrent traditions, canons, moments, and tensions that have long been neglected and overlooked. Excitement for The Latino Nineteenth Century will have no bounds: this is sure to become a treasured volume. -- Claudia Milian, author of Latining America: Black-Brown Passages and the Coloring of Latino/a StudiesThe Latino Nineteenth Century is expressive of the new directions in Latinx studies, and demonstrates the capaciousness of this field in accommodating nineteenth-century literary studies, and not the other way around. Indeed, the collection as a whole demonstrates that the Latinx nineteenth century is not a smaller, narrow subfield of this period, but rather constitutive of and formative to the field of nineteenth-century US literary studies. The editors of this volume challenge us to rethink our own orientations in C19 so as to think and teach in this field more expansively. * American Literary History *

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Book SynopsisIn Unsettled States, Dana Luciano and Ivy G. Wilson present some of the most exciting emergent scholarship in American literary and cultural studies of the long nineteenth century. Featuring eleven essays from senior scholars across the discipline, the book responds to recent critical challenges to the boundaries, both spatial and temporal, that have traditionally organized scholarship within the field. The volume considers these recent challenges to be aftershocks of earlier revolutions in content and method, and it seeks ways of inhabiting and amplifying the ongoing unsettledness of the field.Written by scholars primarily working in the minor fields of critical race and ethnic studies, feminist and gender studies, labor studies, and queer/sexuality studies, the essays share a minoritarian critical orientation. Minoritarian criticism, as an aesthetic, political, and ethical project, is dedicated to finding new connections and possibilities within extant frameworks. Unsettled Trade ReviewInnovative and thought-provoking, this collection will be of broad interest, opening up discussions on an array of texts, critical approaches, and developing conversations in the study of of nineteenth-century literature. With essays that are accessible, lucid, and utterly fascinating,Unsettled Statesoffers arresting analyses andmakes a real contributionto the field. -- Dana Nelson,author of Bad for DemocracyUnsettled Statessheds light on the papers long swept under the rug ranging from early Hispanic literature to polar periodicals. More importantly, the authors of the articles conscientiously build up their discussions in relation to contemporary literature and critical theory, which makes the collection even more distinguishing and valuable for the twenty-first century reader. * American Studies Journal *Table of ContentsContents Introduction: On Moving Ground 1 Dana Luciano Part I: Archives Unbound 1. Confederates in the Hispanic Attic: The Archive against Itself 31 Rodrigo Lazo 2. Historical Totality and the African American Archive 55 Lloyd Pratt 3. Race, Reenactment, and the "Natural-Born Citizen" 76 Tavia Nyong'o 4. Doing Justice to the Archive: Beyond Literature 103 Shelley Streeby Part II: States of Exception 5. Unsettled Life: Early Liberia's Epistolary Equivocations 119 David Kazanjian 6. The News at the Ends of the Earth: Polar Periodicals 158 Hester Blum 7. Feeling Like a State: Writing the 1863 New York City Draft Riots 189 Glenn Hendler 8. Impersonating the State of Exception 232 Jonathan Elmer Part III: Speculative Sexualities 9. Eat, Sex, Race 245 Kyla Wazana Tompkins 10. Connecticut Yankings: Mark Twain and the Masturbating Dude 275 Elizabeth Freeman 11. What Came Before 298 Peter Coviello P.S.: A Coda 307 Ivy G. Wilson About the Contributors 315 Index 317

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Book SynopsisIn Unsettled States, Dana Luciano and Ivy G. Wilson present some of the most exciting emergent scholarship in American literary and cultural studies of the long nineteenth century. Featuring eleven essays from senior scholars across the discipline, the book responds to recent critical challenges to the boundaries, both spatial and temporal, that have traditionally organized scholarship within the field. The volume considers these recent challenges to be aftershocks of earlier revolutions in content and method, and it seeks ways of inhabiting and amplifying the ongoing unsettledness of the field.Written by scholars primarily working in the minor fields of critical race and ethnic studies, feminist and gender studies, labor studies, and queer/sexuality studies, the essays share a minoritarian critical orientation. Minoritarian criticism, as an aesthetic, political, and ethical project, is dedicated to finding new connections and possibilities within extant frameworks. Unsettled Trade ReviewInnovative and thought-provoking, this collection will be of broad interest, opening up discussions on an array of texts, critical approaches, and developing conversations in the study of of nineteenth-century literature. With essays that are accessible, lucid, and utterly fascinating,Unsettled Statesoffers arresting analyses andmakes a real contributionto the field. -- Dana Nelson,author of Bad for DemocracyUnsettled Statessheds light on the papers long swept under the rug ranging from early Hispanic literature to polar periodicals. More importantly, the authors of the articles conscientiously build up their discussions in relation to contemporary literature and critical theory, which makes the collection even more distinguishing and valuable for the twenty-first century reader. * American Studies Journal *Table of ContentsContents Introduction: On Moving Ground 1 Dana Luciano Part I: Archives Unbound 1. Confederates in the Hispanic Attic: The Archive against Itself 31 Rodrigo Lazo 2. Historical Totality and the African American Archive 55 Lloyd Pratt 3. Race, Reenactment, and the "Natural-Born Citizen" 76 Tavia Nyong'o 4. Doing Justice to the Archive: Beyond Literature 103 Shelley Streeby Part II: States of Exception 5. Unsettled Life: Early Liberia's Epistolary Equivocations 119 David Kazanjian 6. The News at the Ends of the Earth: Polar Periodicals 158 Hester Blum 7. Feeling Like a State: Writing the 1863 New York City Draft Riots 189 Glenn Hendler 8. Impersonating the State of Exception 232 Jonathan Elmer Part III: Speculative Sexualities 9. Eat, Sex, Race 245 Kyla Wazana Tompkins 10. Connecticut Yankings: Mark Twain and the Masturbating Dude 275 Elizabeth Freeman 11. What Came Before 298 Peter Coviello P.S.: A Coda 307 Ivy G. Wilson About the Contributors 315 Index 317

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Book SynopsisThe unheard history of how race and racism are constructed from sound and maintained through the listening ear. Race is a visual phenomenon, the ability to see difference. At least that is what conventional wisdom has lead us to believe. Yet, The Sonic Color Line argues that American ideologies of white supremacy are just as dependent on what we hearvoices, musical taste, volumeas they are on skin color or hair texture. Reinforcing compelling new ideas about the relationship between race and sound with meticulous historical research, Jennifer Lynn Stoever helps us to better understand how sound and listening not only register the racial politics of our world, but actively produce them. Through analysis of the historical traces of sounds of African American performers, Stoever reveals a host of racialized aural representations operating at the level of the unseenthe sonic color lineand exposes the racialized listening practices she figures as the listening ear. UsiTrade ReviewThe Sonic Color Linewill open up new vistas for thinking about sound, race, and identity, and for understanding how racism is enforced through both sounding and listening. Painstakingly researched and written with verve, Stoevers book will shape the way scholars of American and African American culture and history think about sound, even when our primary texts, like photographs and literary works, are seemingly silent. -- Gayle Wald,author of It's Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power TelevisionA gripping read and a rousing call to political attunement by way of sound, The Sonic Color Line investigates scenes of racialized audition from Civil War times to the Civil Rights era. This theoretically rich and passionately argued book made me wiser about the social relations that define sound, the resonant events that suggest how the ear is disciplined, the racial politics of listening that extend into every corner of the republic. -- Eric Lott,City University of New York Graduate CenterThat the critical intertexts for this book are not only scholarly works but also the Black Lives Matter movement and the many other political movements dedicated to racial justice is a key element in its timeliness and appeal. Engaged scholarship dedicated to an ethics of equality, community, and demystification is a powerful necessity in these times of increasing uncertainty about what 'America' is and how it came to be. -- John Melillo * American Literary History Online *

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