English Books

Edited by Melissa Castillo Planas and Debra A. Castillo.

Scholars in COVID Times documents the new and innovative forms of scholarship, community collaboration, and teaching brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this volume, Melissa Castillo Planas and Debra A. Castillo bring together a diverse range of texts, from research-based studies to self-reflective essays, to reexamine what it means to be a publicly engaged scholar in the era of COVID.

Between social distancing, masking, and remote teaching—along with the devastating physical and emotional tolls on individuals and families—the disruption of COVID-19 in academia has given motivated scholars an opportunity (or necessitated them) to reconsider how they interact with and inspire students, conduct research, and continue collaborative projects. Addressing a broad range of factors, from anti-Asian racism to pedagogies of resilience and escapism, digital pen pals to international performance, the essays are connected by a flexible, creative approach to community engagement as a core aspect of research and teaching. Timely and urgent, but with long-term implications and applications, Scholars in COVID Times offers a heterogeneous vision of scholarly and pedagogical innovation in an era of contestation and crisis.

“K for the Way” explores writing, rhetoric, and literacy from the perspective of the Hip Hop DJ. Todd Craig, a DJ himself, establishes and investigates the function of DJ rhetoric and literacy, illuminating the DJ as a fruitful example for (re)envisioning approaches to writing, research, and analysis in contemporary educational settings. Because it is widely recognized that the DJ was the catalyst for the creation of Hip Hop culture, this book begins a new conversation in which Hip Hop DJs introduce ideas about poetics and language formation through the modes, practices, and techniques they engage in on a daily basis.

Using material from a larger qualitative research study that illustrates the Hip Hop DJ as a twenty-first-century new media reader, writer, and literary critic, Craig blends interviews from prominent and influential DJs in the Hip Hop community with narrative and interdisciplinary scholarship from writing studies, Hip Hop studies, African American studies, urban education, and ethnomusicology. The voices of DJs sit front and center, presenting a revolutionary conversation about writing and communication in the twenty-first century.

Weaving Craig’s life experiences with important discussions of racial literacies, “K for the Way” is a layered and utterly singular exploration of culture, identity, and literacy in America.

A cutting-edge view of the digital humanities at a time of global pandemic, catastrophe, and uncertainty

Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023 presents a state-of-the-field vision of digital humanities amid rising social, political, economic, and environmental crises; a global pandemic; and the deepening of austerity regimes in U.S. higher education. This fourth volume in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series provides a look not just at where DH stands but also where it is going.

An incisive memoir of Rachel M. Brownstein’s seemingly quintessential Jewish mother, a resilient and courageous immigrant in New York.

When she arrived alone in New York in 1924, eighteen-year-old Reisel Thaler resembled the other Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Eastern Europe who accompanied her. Yet she already had an American passport tucked in her scant luggage. Reisel had drawn her first breath on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1905, then was taken back to Galicia (in what is now Poland) by her father before she turned two. She was, as she would boast to the end of her days, “American born.” 

While the national narrative coming out of Ireland since the 2008 economic crisis has been relentlessly sanguine, fiction has offered a more nuanced perspective from both well-established and emerging authors. In Broken Irelands, McGlynn examines Irish fiction of the post-crash era, addressing the proliferation of writing that downplays realistic and grammatical coherence. Noting that these traits have the effect of diminishing human agency, blurring questions of responsibility, and emphasizing emotion over rationality, McGlynn argues that they reflect and respond to social and economic conditions during the global economic crisis and its aftermath of recession, austerity, and precarity. Rather than focusing on overt discussions of the crash and recession, McGlynn explores how the dominance of an economic worldview, including a pervasive climate of financialized discourse, shapes the way stories are told. In the writing of such authors as Anne Enright, Colum McCann, Mike McCormack, and Lisa McInerney, McGlynn unpacks the ways that formal departures from realism through grammatical asymmetries like unconventional verb tenses, novel syntactic choices, and reliance on sentence fragments align with a cultural moment shaped by feelings of impotence and rhetorics of personal responsibility.

Chingona Rules is a handbook for resiliency and a radical love letter to unapologetic bodies that know “healing starts at the wound.” Melissa Castillo Planas proves we don’t have to bleed out in our poems in order to be heard, but if we choose to, we suture the wound and wear the scar proudly.  She invites us to dream boundlessly, despite the dystopian society she calls her American home of “fantasias imposibles” and rather than paint a perfect picture, Castillo Planas proudly points to her tattoos, with the smirk of satisfaction, self-acceptance, and ancestral knowledge that declares Chingonas like her “will not be contained.” – Peggy Robles- Alvarado, poet

Also by Christina Katopodis (Ph.D. in English, 2021)

What the latest science of learning tells us about inspiring, effective, and inclusive teaching at the college level.

College instruction is stuck in the past. If a time traveler from a century ago arrived on today’s campuses, they would recognize only too well the listlessness of the lecture hall and the awkward silence of the seminar room. Yet we know how to do better. Cathy N. Davidson and Christina Katopodis, two of the world’s foremost innovators in higher education, turn to the latest research and methods to show how teachers at every kind of institution can help students become independent, creative, and active learners.

The New College Classroom helps instructors in all disciplines create an environment that is truly conducive to learning. Davidson and Katopodis translate cutting-edge research in learning science and pedagogy into ready-to-use strategies to incorporate into any course. These empirically driven, classroom-tested techniques of active learning—from the participatory syllabus and ungrading to grab-and-go activities for every day of the term—have achieved impressive results at community colleges and research universities, on campus, online, and in hybrid settings.

Extensive evidence shows that active-learning tools are more effective than conventional methods of instruction. Davidson and Katopodis explain how and why their approach works and provide detailed case studies of educators successfully applying active-learning techniques in their courses every day, ensuring that their students are better prepared for the world after college.

Through expert guidance on understanding, interpreting, and writing about Shakespeare's language, this book makes The Winter's Tale accessible and exciting for students. It demonstrates that careful attention to Shakespeare's complex dramatic language can clarify the structure and concerns of the play, as well as provide deep and satisfying engagement with the social, political and ethical questions Shakespeare raises. Each chapter features a 'Writing Matters' section designed to connect analysis of Shakespeare's language to students' development of their own writing strategies. The book examines topics in the play such as tragicomic genre; women's assertion of social and political agency; obedience and resistance to rulers; the virtues and risks of following festivity, and disputes over the proper forms of religious devotion.

In this collection, Literacy and Learning in Times of Crisis: Emergent Teaching Through Emergencies, the contributors offer insights from theoretical, historical, and pedagogical lenses and these critical insights emerge out of their academic, scholarly, and personal experiences of teaching during crises. In some cases, authors have taught while battling COVID, and others have done so while addressing and acknowledging school-based violence. While some teach the analysis of the discourse of crisis, others critique the missteps of policy-making during calamity. More so, some authors examine the finesse of micro-teaching at emotional levels; others find the means to develop macro-structures of programmatic curriculum. Literacy and Learning in Times of Crisis highlights the educational decision making that educators have used to cope with the dilemmas that they and their students have faced at the turn of the millennium. Specifically, contributors to this collection offer a broad range of experiences, expertise, and engagement with pedagogy during emergencies that we currently face but also frame issues of emergencies that will inevitably challenge educators in the future.

Co-editors Sara P. Alvarez, Yana Kuchirko, Mark McBeth, Meghmala Tarafdar, and Missy Watson bring varying expertise and knowledge about pedagogy to their editorial efforts on this collection. All are faculty members of the City University of New York, instructing a wide diversity of students at CUNY’s many campuses. In the largest public university in the nation, they have each supported students’ learning through dire national emergency events, such as 9/11, Hurricane Sandy, highly publicized police violence as well as other large-and-small-scale crises.

A biography of the flamboyant and unapologetically avant-garde Mina Loy.

Mina Loy was born in London in 1882, became American, and lived variously in New York, Europe and, finally, Aspen, Colorado, where she died in 1966. Flamboyant and unapologetically avant-garde, she was a poet, painter, novelist, essayist, manifesto writer, actress, and dress and lampshade designer. Her life involved an impossible abundance of artistic friends, performance and spectacular adventures in the worlds of Futurism, Christian Science, feminism, fashion, and everything modern and modernist.

This new account by Mary Ann Caws explores Mina Loy’s exceptional life, and features many rare images of Loy and her husband, the Swiss writer, poet, artist, boxer and provocateur Arthur Cravan, who disappeared without trace in 1918.

Ultramarine distills four years of Koestenbaum’s trance notebooks (2015–2019) into a series of tightly-sewn collage-poems, filled with desiring bodies, cultural touchstones, and salty memories. Beyond Proust’s madeleine we head toward a “deli” version of utopia, crafted from hamantaschen, cupcake, and cucumber. Painting and its processes bring bright colors to the surface. Through interludes in Rome, Paris, and Cologne, Ultramarine reaches across memory, back to Europe, beyond the literal world into dream-habitats conjured through language’s occult structures.

In Communities of Care, Talia Schaffer explores Victorian fictional representations of care communities, small voluntary groups that coalesce around someone in need. Drawing lessons from Victorian sociality, Schaffer proposes a theory of communal care and a mode of critical reading centered on an ethics of care.

In the Victorian era, medical science offered little hope for cure of illness or disability, and chronic invalidism and lengthy convalescences were common. Small communities might gather around afflicted individuals to minister to their needs and palliate their suffering. Communities of Care examines these groups in the novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, and Charlotte Yonge, and studies the relationships that they exemplify. How do carers become part of the community? How do they negotiate status? How do caring emotions develop? And what does it mean to think of care as an activity rather than a feeling? Contrasting the Victorian emphasis on community and social structure with modern individualism and interiority, Schaffer’s sympathetic readings draw us closer to the worldview from which these novels emerged. Schaffer also considers the ways in which these models of carework could inform and improve practice in criticism, in teaching, and in our daily lives.

Through the lens of care, Schaffer discovers a vital form of communal relationship in the Victorian novel. Communities of Care also demonstrates that literary criticism done well is the best care that scholars can give to texts.

Games and Theatre in Shakespeare's England brings together theories of play and game with theatre and performance to produce new understandings of the history and design of early modern English drama. Through literary analysis and embodied practice, an international team of distinguished scholars examines a wide range of games—from dicing to bowling to role-playing to videogames—to uncover their fascinating ramifications for the stage in Shakespeare’s era and our own. Foregrounding ludic elements challenges the traditional view of drama as principally mimesis, or imitation, revealing stageplays to be improvisational experiments and participatory explorations into the motive, means, and value of recreation. Delving into both canonical masterpieces and hidden gems, this innovative volume stakes a claim for play as the crucial link between games and early modern theatre, and for the early modern theatre as a critical site for unraveling the continued cultural significance and performative efficacy of gameplay today.

Disaffected examines the effects of antisedition law on the overlapping public spheres of India and Britain under empire. 

After 1857, the British government began censoring the press in India, culminating in 1870 with the passage of Section 124a, a law that used the term "disaffection" to target the emotional tenor of writing deemed threatening to imperial rule. As a result, Tanya Agathocleous shows, Indian journalists adopted modes of writing that appeared to mimic properly British styles of prose even as they wrote against empire.

Agathocleous argues that Section 124a, which is still used to quell political dissent in present-day India, both irrevocably shaped conversations and critiques in the colonial public sphere and continues to influence anticolonialism and postcolonial relationships between the state and the public. Disaffected draws out the coercive and emotional subtexts of law, literature, and cultural relationships, demonstrating how the criminalization of political alienation and dissent has shaped literary form and the political imagination.

David S. Reynolds, author of the Bancroft Prize-winning cultural biography of Walt Whitman and many other iconic works of nineteenth century American history, understands the currents in which Abraham Lincoln swam as well as anyone alive. His magisterial biography Abe is the product of full-body immersion into the riotous tumult of American life in the decades before the Civil War.

It was a country growing up and being pulled apart at the same time, with a democratic popular culture that reflected the country’s contradictions. Lincoln’s lineage was considered auspicious by Emerson, Whitman, and others who prophesied that a new man from the West would emerge to balance North and South. From New England Puritan stock on his father’s side and Virginia Cavalier gentry on his mother’s, Lincoln was linked by blood to the central conflict of the age. And an enduring theme of his life, Reynolds shows, was his genius for striking a balance between opposing forces. Lacking formal schooling but with an unquenchable thirst for self-improvement, Lincoln had a talent for wrestling and bawdy jokes that made him popular with his peers, even as his appetite for poetry and prodigious gifts for memorization set him apart from them through his childhood, his years as a lawyer, and his entrance into politics.

No one can transcend the limitations of their time, and Lincoln was no exception. But what emerges from Reynolds’s masterful reckoning is a man who at each stage in his life managed to arrive at a broader view of things than all but his most enlightened peers. As a politician, he moved too slowly for some and too swiftly for many, but he always pushed toward justice while keeping the whole nation in mind. Abe culminates, of course, in the Civil War, the defining test of Lincoln and his beloved country. Reynolds shows us the extraordinary range of cultural knowledge Lincoln drew from as he shaped a vision of true union, transforming, in Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, “the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”

Abraham Lincoln did not come out of nowhere. But if he was shaped by his times, he also managed at his life’s fateful hour to shape them to an extent few could have foreseen. Ultimately, this is the great drama that astonishes us still, and that Abe brings to fresh and vivid life. The measure of that life will always be part of our American education.

In his poetry Walt Whitman set out to encompass all of America and in so doing heal its deepening divisions. This magisterial biography demonstrates the epic scale of his achievement, as well as the dreams and anxieties that impelled it, for it places the poet securely within the political and cultural context of his age.

Combing through the full range of Whitman's writing, David Reynolds shows how Whitman gathered inspiration from every stratum of nineteenth-century American life: the convulsions of slavery and depression; the raffish dandyism of the Bowery ""b'hoys""; the exuberant rhetoric of actors, orators, and divines. We see how Whitman reconciled his own sexuality with contemporary social mores and how his energetic courtship of the public presaged the vogues of advertising and celebrity. Brilliantly researched, captivatingly told, Walt Whitman's America is a triumphant work of scholarship that breathes new life into the biographical genre.

In a documentarian investigation of the major LGBTQ archives in the United States, Queer Literacies: Discourses and Discontents identifies the homophobic discourses that prevailed in the twentieth-century by those discursive forces that also sponsored the literacy acquisition of the nation. Mark McBeth tracks down the evidence of how these sponsors of literacy—families, teachers, librarians, doctors, scientists, and government agents—instituted heteronormative platforms upon which public discourses were constructed. After pinpointing and analyzing how this disparaging rhetoric emerged, McBeth examines how certain LGBTQ advocates took counter-literacy measures to upend and replace those discourses with more Queer-affirming articulations. Having lived contemporaneously while these events occurred, McBeth incorporate narratives of his own lived experience of how these discourses impacted his own reading, writing, and researching capabilities. In this auto-archival research investigation, McBeth argues that throughout the twentieth century, Queer literates revised dominant and oppressive discourses as a means of survival and world-making in their own words. Scholars of rhetoric, gender studies, LGBTQ studies, literary studies, and communication studies will find this book particularly useful. 

The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature offers 45 chapters by leading international scholars working with the most dynamic and influential political, cultural, and theoretical issues addressing Victorian literature today. Scholars and students will find this collection both useful and inspiring.

Rigorously engaged with current scholarship that is both historically sensitive and theoretically informed, the Routledge Companion places the genres of the novel, poetry, and drama and issues of gender, social class, and race in conversation with subjects like ecology, colonialism, the Gothic, digital humanities, sexualities, disability, material culture, and animal studies.

This guide is aimed at scholars who want to know the most significant critical approaches in Victorian studies, often written by the very scholars who helped found those fields. It addresses major theoretical movements such as narrative theory, formalism, historicism, and economic theory, as well as Victorian models of subjects such as anthropology, cognitive science, and religion. With its lists of key works, rich cross-referencing, extensive bibliographies, and explications of scholarly trajectories, the book is a crucial resource for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, while offering invaluable support to more seasoned scholars.

In The Difference Aesthetics Makes cultural critic Kandice Chuh asks what the humanities might be and do if organized around what she calls “illiberal humanism” instead of around the Western European tradition of liberal humanism that undergirds the humanities in their received form. Recognizing that the liberal humanities contribute to the reproduction of the subjugation that accompanies liberalism's definition of the human, Chuh argues that instead of defending the humanities, as has been widely called for in recent years, we should radically remake them. Chuh proposes that the work of artists and writers like Lan Samantha Chang, Carrie Mae Weems, Langston Hughes, Leslie Marmon Silko, Allan deSouza, Monique Truong, and others brings to bear ways of being and knowing that delegitimize liberal humanism in favor of more robust, capacious, and worldly senses of the human and the humanities. Chuh presents the aesthetics of illiberal humanism as vital to the creation of sensibilities and worlds capable of making life and lives flourish.

Reimagines black and brown sensuality to develop new modes of knowledge production

In Sensual Excess, Amber Jamilla Musser imagines epistemologies of sensuality that emerge from fleshiness. To do so, she works against the framing of black and brown bodies as sexualized, objectified, and abject, and offers multiple ways of thinking with and through sensation and aesthetics. Each chapter draws our attention to particular aspects of pornotropic capture that black and brown bodies must always negotiate. Though these technologies differ according to the nature of their encounters with white supremacy, together they add to our understanding of the ways that structures of domination produce violence and work to contain bodies and pleasures within certain legible parameters.

To do so, Sensual Excess analyzes moments of brown jouissance that exceed these constraints. These ruptures illuminate multiple epistemologies of selfhood and sensuality that offer frameworks for minoritarian knowledge production which is designed to enable one to sit with uncertainty. Through examinations of installations and performances like Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, Patty Chang’s In Love and Nao Bustamante’s Neapolitan, Musser unpacks the relationships between racialized sexuality and consumption to interrogate foundational concepts in psychoanalytic theory, critical race studies, feminism, and queer theory. In so doing, Sensual Excess offers a project of knowledge production focused not on mastery, but on sensing and imagining otherwise, whatever and wherever that might be.

Can there be a novel of the international working class despite the conditions and constraints of economic globalization? What does it mean to invoke working-class writing as an ethical intervention in an age of comparative advantage and outsourcing?

No Country argues for a rethinking of the genre of working-class literature. Sonali Perera expands our understanding of working-class fiction by considering a range of international texts, identifying textual, political, and historical linkages often overlooked by Eurocentric and postcolonial scholarship. Her readings connect the literary radicalism of the 1930s to the feminist recovery projects of the 1970s, and the anticolonial and postcolonial fiction of the 1960s to today's counterglobalist struggles, building a new portrait of the twentieth century's global economy and the experiences of the working class within it.

Perera considers novels by the Indian anticolonial writer Mulk Raj Anand; the American proletarian writer Tillie Olsen; Sri Lankan Tamil/Black British writer and political journalist Ambalavaner Sivanandan; Indian writer and bonded-labor activist Mahasweta Devi; South African-born Botswanan Bessie Head; and the fiction and poetry published under the collective signature Dabindu, a group of free-trade-zone garment factory workers and feminist activists in contemporary Sri Lanka. Articulating connections across the global North-South divide, Perera creates a new genealogy of working-class writing as world literature and transforms the ideological underpinnings casting literature as cultural practice.

How to Live, What to Do is an indispensable introduction to and guide through the work of a poet equal in power and sensibility to Shakespeare and Milton. Like them, Stevens shaped a new language, fashioning an instrument adequate to describing a completely changed environment of fact, extending perception through his poems to align what Emerson called our “axis of vision” with the universe as it came to be understood during his lifetime, 1879–1955, a span shared with Albert Einstein. Projecting his own imagination into spacetime as “a priest of the invisible,” persistently cultivating his cosmic consciousness through reading, keeping abreast of the latest discoveries of Einstein, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Louis de Broglie, and others, Stevens pushed the boundaries of language into the exotic territories of relativity and quantum mechanics while at the same time honoring the continuing human need for belief in some larger order. His work records how to live, what to do in this strange new world of experience, seeing what was always seen but never seen before. 

Joan Richardson, author of the standard two-volume critical biography of Stevens and coeditor with Frank Kermode of the Library of America edition of the Collected Poetry and Prose, offers concise, lucid captures of Stevens’s development and achievement. Over the ten years of researching her Stevens biography, Richardson read all that he read, as well as his complete correspondence, journals, and notebooks. She weaves the details drawn from this deep involvement into the background of American cultural history of the period. This fabric is further enlivened by her preparation in philosophy and the sciences, creating in these thirteen panels a contemporary version of a medieval tapestry sequence, with Stevens in the place of the unicorn, as it were, holding our attention and eliciting, as necessary angel, individual solutions to the riddles of our existence on this planet spinning and hissing around its cooling star at 18.5 miles per second.

For more than three decades, preeminent scholars in comparative literature and postcolonial studies have called for a return to philology as the indispensable basis of critical method in the humanities. Against such calls, this book argues that the privilege philology has always enjoyed within the modern humanities silently reinforces a colonial hierarchy. In fact, each of philology's foundational innovations originally served British rule in India.

Tracing an unacknowledged history that extends from British Orientalist Sir William Jones to Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said and beyond, Archaeology of Babel excavates the epistemic transformation that was engendered on a global scale by the colonial reconstruction of native languages, literatures, and law. In the process, it reveals the extent to which even postcolonial studies and European philosophy—not to mention discourses as disparate as Islamic fundamentalism, Hindu nationalism, and global environmentalism—are the progeny of colonial rule. Going further, it unearths the alternate concepts of language and literature that were lost along the way and issues its own call for humanists to reckon with the politics of the philological practices to which they now return.

As there has yet to be any substantial scrutiny of the complex confluences a more sustained dialogue between disability studies and comics studies might suggest, Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives aims through its broad range of approaches and focus points to explore this exciting subject in productive and provocative ways.

Romance's Rival argues that the central plot of the most important genre of the nineteenth century, the marriage plot novel, means something quite different from what we thought. In Victorian novels, women may marry for erotic desire--but they might, instead, insist on "familiar marriage," marrying trustworthy companions who can offer them socially rich lives and futures of meaningful work. Romance's Rival shows how familiar marriage expresses ideas of female subjectivity dating back through the seventeenth century, while romantic marriage felt like a new, risky idea.

Undertaking a major rereading of the rise-of-the-novel tradition, from Richardson through the twentieth century, Talia Schaffer rethinks what the novel meant if one tracks familiar-marriage virtues. This alternative perspective offers new readings of major texts (Austen, the Brontës, Eliot, Trollope) but it also foregrounds women's popular fiction (Yonge, Oliphant, Craik, Broughton). Offering a feminist perspective that reads the marriage plot from the woman's point of view, Schaffer inquires why a female character might legitimately wish to marry for something other than passion. For the past half-century, scholars have valorized desire, individuality, and autonomy in the way we read novels; Romance's Rival asks us to look at the other side, to validate the yearning for work, family, company, or social power as legitimate reasons for women's marital choices in Victorian fiction.

Comprehensive in its knowledge of several generations of scholarship on the novel, Romance's Rival convinces us to re-examine assumptions about the nature and function of marriage and the role of the novel in helping us not simply imagine marriage but also process changing ideas about what it might look like and how it might serve people.

Lincoln’s Selected Writings includes a rich selection of his public and private letters, speeches, eulogies, proposals, debate transcriptions, addresses (including the First and Second Inaugurals), and more. The texts are accompanied by explanatory annotations, a detailed preface, a note on the texts, and a list of abbreviations.

Lincoln’s writings are followed by contemporary responses to him in poems, songs, and articles; representations of Lincoln in modern imaginative and nonfiction writing; and selections from recent cross-disciplinary studies of Lincoln—including discussions of his literary techniques and oratorical style as well as examinations of his political evolution in new cultural and social contexts. Among the many contributors are Horace Greeley, Jesse Hutchinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Karl Marx, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Victor Hugo, and Walt Whitman.

“Modern Views” presents sixteen major interpretations of Lincoln’s life, work, and legacy carefully chosen to promote discussion. The contributors are Carl Sandburg, Allen C. Guelzo, James Oakes, Gillian Silverman, Richard N. Current, Harold Holzer, Sean Wilentz, Eric Foner, Manisha Sinha, Robert A. Ferguson, Gabor Boritt, James McPherson, Stephen Cushman, Faith Barrett, David S. Reynolds, and Richard Carwardine and Jay Sexton.

In everyday language, masochism is usually understood as the desire to abdicate control in exchange for sensation—pleasure, pain, or a combination thereof. Yet at its core, masochism is a site where power, bodies, and society come together. Sensational Flesh uses masochism as a lens to examine how power structures race, gender, and embodiment in different contexts.

Drawing on rich and varied sources—from 19th century sexology, psychoanalysis, and critical theory to literary texts and performance art—Amber Jamilla Musser employs masochism as a powerful diagnostic tool for probing relationships between power and subjectivity. Engaging with a range of debates about lesbian S&M, racialization, femininity, and disability, as well as key texts such as Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Pauline Réage’s The Story of O, and Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, Musser renders legible the complex ways that masochism has been taken up by queer, feminist, and critical race theories. Furthering queer theory’s investment in affect and materiality, she proposes “sensation” as an analytical tool for illustrating what it feels like to be embedded in structures of domination such as patriarchy, colonialism, and racism and what it means to embody femininity, blackness, and pain. Sensational Flesh is ultimately about the ways in which difference is made material through race, gender, and sexuality and how that materiality is experienced.

Recent global security threats, economic instability, and political uncertainty have placed great scrutiny on the requirements for U.S. citizenship. The stipulation of literacy has long been one of these criteria. In Producing Good Citizens, Amy J. Wan examines the historic roots of this phenomenon, looking specifically to the period just before World War I, up until the Great Depression. During this time, the United States witnessed a similar anxiety over the influx of immigrants, economic uncertainty, and global political tensions.

Early on, educators bore the brunt of literacy training, while also being charged with producing the right kind of citizens by imparting civic responsibility and a moral code for the workplace and society. Literacy quickly became the credential to gain legal, economic, and cultural status. In her study, Wan defines three distinct pedagogical spaces for literacy training during the 1910s and 1920s: Americanization and citizenship programs sponsored by the federal government, union-sponsored programs, and first year university writing programs. Wan also demonstrates how each literacy program had its own motivation: the federal government desired productive citizens, unions needed educated members to fight for labor reform, and university educators looked to aid social mobility.

Citing numerous literacy theorists, Wan analyzes the correlation of reading and writing skills to larger currents within American society. She shows how early literacy training coincided with the demand for laborers during the rise of mass manufacturing, while also providing an avenue to economic opportunity for immigrants. This fostered a rhetorical link between citizenship, productivity, and patriotism. Wan supplements her analysis with an examination of citizen training books, labor newspapers, factory manuals, policy documents, public deliberations on citizenship and literacy, and other materials from the period to reveal the goal and rationale behind each program.

Wan relates the enduring bond of literacy and citizenship to current times, by demonstrating the use of literacy to mitigate economic inequality, and its lasting value to a productivity-based society. Today, as in the past, educators continue to serve as an integral part of the literacy training and citizen-making process.

“Fascinating . . . a lively and perceptive cultural history.” —Annette Gordon-Reed, The New Yorker

In this wide-ranging, brilliantly researched work, David S. Reynolds traces the factors that made Uncle Tom’s Cabin the most influential novel ever written by an American. Upon its 1852 publication, the novel’s vivid depiction of slavery polarized its American readership, ultimately widening the rift that led to the Civil War. Reynolds also charts the novel’s afterlife—including its adaptation into plays, films, and consumer goods—revealing its lasting impact on American entertainment, advertising, and race relations.

How the civil rights movement changed the careers of four white American writers as well as the literary establishment

The statement, “The Civil Rights Movement changed America,” though true, has become something of a cliché. Civil Rights in the White Literary Imagination seeks to determine how, exactly, the Civil Rights Movement changed the literary possibilities of four iconic American writers: Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Eudora Welty, and William Styron. Each of these writers published significant works prior to the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954 and the Montgomery Bus Boycott that began in December of the following year, making it possible to trace their evolution in reaction to these events. The work these writers crafted in response to the upheaval of the day, from Warren's Who Speaks for the Negro?, to Mailer's “The White Negro” to Welty's “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” to Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner, reveal much about their own feeling in the moment even as they contribute to the national conversation that centered on race and democracy.

By examining these works closely, Gray posits the argument that these writers significantly shaped discourse on civil rights as the movement was occurring but did so in ways that—intentionally or not—often relied upon a notion of the relative innocence of the South with regard to racial affairs, and on a construct of African Americans as politically and/or culturally naive. As these writers grappled with race and the myth of southern nobility, their work developed in ways that were simultaneously sympathetic of, and condescending to, black intellectual thought occurring at the same time.

Winner of the MRDS 2013 David Bevington Award for Best New Book in Early Drama Studies! Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources, Lin reconstructs playgoers' typical ways of thinking and feeling and demonstrates how these culturally-trained habits of mind shaped dramatic narratives and the presentational dynamics of onstage action.

This book targets one of the humanities' most widely held premises: namely, that the European Enlightenment laid the groundwork for modern imperialism. It argues instead that the Enlightenment's vision of empire calls our own historical and theoretical paradigms into question. While eighteenth-century British India has not received nearly the same attention as nineteenth- and twentieth-century empires, it is the place where colonial rule and Enlightenment reason first became entwined. The Stillbirth of Capital makes its case by examining every work about British India written by a major author from 1670 to 1815, a period that coincides not only with the Enlightenment but also with the institution of a global economy.

In contrast to both Marxist and liberal scholars, figures such as Dryden, Defoe, Voltaire, Sterne, Smith, Bentham, Burke, Sheridan, and Scott locate modernity's roots not in the birth of capital but rather in the collusion of sovereign power and monopoly commerce, which used Indian Ocean wealth to finance the unfathomable costs of modern war. Ahmed reveals the pertinence of eighteenth-century writing to our own moment of danger, when the military alliance of hegemonic states and private corporations has become even more far-reaching than it was in centuries past.

Novel Craft explores an intriguing and under-studied aspect of cultural life in Victorian England: domestic handicrafts, the decorative pursuit that predated the Arts and Crafts movement. Talia Schaffer argues that the handicraft movement served as a way to critique the modern mass-produced commodity and the rapidly emerging industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century. Her argument is illustrated with the four pivotal novels that form her study's core-Gaskell's Cranford, Yonge's The Daisy Chain, Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, and Oliphant's Phoebe Junior. Each features various handicrafts that subtly aim to subvert the socioeconomic changes being wrought by industrialization. Schaffer goes beyond straightforward textual analysis by shaping each chapter around the individual craft at the center of each novel (paper for Cranford, flowers and related arts in The Daisy Chain, rubbish and salvage in Our Mutual Friend, and the contrasting ethos of arts and crafts connoisseurship in Phoebe Junior). The domestic handicraft also allows for self-referential analysis of the text itself; in scenes of craft production (and destruction), the authors articulate the work they hope their own fictions perform. The handicraft also becomes a locus for critiquing contemporary aesthetic trends, with the novels putting forward an alternative vision of making value and understanding art. A work that combines cultural history and literary studies, Novel Craft highlights how attention to the handicraft movement's radically alternative views of materiality, consumption, production, representation, and subjectivity provides a fresh perspective on the major changes that shaped the Victorian novel as a whole.

When published in 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin was a sensation, selling more than 300,000 copies in the United States by the end of the year; it went on to be the nineteenth century's worldwide bestseller. The publisher released a lavishly illustrated gift version for the Christmas season, widely known as the "Splendid Edition," with more than one hundred detailed engravings by Hammatt Billings. The illustrations amplify the book's abolitionist ideas and capture its historical moment, lending the narrative a moving immediacy. The edition was never reissued until now; this facsimile gives general readers the chance to experience Harriet Beecher Stowe's classic in this most revealing form. Reynolds' substantial introduction situates the novel within the world of ideas and images operative at the time. 

The award-winning Beneath the American Renaissance is a classic work on American literature. It immeasurably broadens our knowledge of our most important literary period, as first identified by F.O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance. With its combination of sharp critical insight, engaging observation, and narrative drive, it represents the kind of masterful cultural history for which David Reynolds is known. Here the major works of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Dickinson receive striking, original readings set against the rich backdrop of contemporary popular writing. Now back in print, the volume includes a new foreword by historian Sean Wilentz that reveals the book's impact and influence. A magisterial work of criticism and cultural history, Beneath the American Renaissance will fascinate anyone interested in the genesis of America's most significant literary epoch and the iconic figures who defined it.

Uncle Tom's Cabin may be the most influential novel ever written by an American. In a fitting tribute to the 200th anniversary of Harriet Beecher Stowe's birth, Bancroft Prize-winning historian Reynolds reveals her book's impact not only on the abolitionist movement and the American Civil War but also on worldwide events, including the end of serfdom in Russia, down to its influence in the twentieth century. He explores how Stowe's background, as the daughter in a famously intellectual family of preachers, and her religious visions were fundamental to the novel. And he demonstrates why the book was beloved by millions-and won over even some Southerners-while fueling lasting conflicts over the meaning of America. Although vilified over the years as often as praised, it has remained a cultural landmark. 

America experienced unprecedented growth and turmoil in the years between 1815 and 1848. It was an age when Andrew Jackson redefined the presidency and James K. Polk expanded the nation's territory. Historian and literary critic David S. Reynolds captures the turbulence of a democracy caught in the throes of the controversy over slavery, the rise of capitalism, and the birth of urbanization. He brings to life the reformers, abolitionists, and temperance advocates who struggled to correct America's worst social ills, and he reveals the shocking phenomena that marked the age: violent mobs, P. T. Barnum's freaks, all-seeing mesmerists, polygamous prophets, and rabble-rousing feminists. Meticulously researched and masterfully written, Waking Giant is a brilliant chronicle of America's vibrant and tumultuous rise.

As the mental faculty that mediates between self and world, mind and body, the senses and the intellect, imagination is indispensable for modern models of subjectivity. From René Descartes's Meditations to the aesthetic and philosophical systems of the Romantic period, to think about the subject necessarily means to address the problem of imagination. In close readings of Descartes, Kant, Fichte, Hardenberg (Novalis) and Coleridge, and with a sustained return to the origins of the discourse about imagination in Greek antiquity, Alexander Schlutz demonstrates that neither the unity of the subject itself, nor the unity of the philosophical systems that are based on it, can be conceptualized without recourse to imagination. Yet, philosophers like Descartes and Kant must deny imagination any such foundational role because of its dangerous connection to the body, the senses and the unruly passions, which threatens the desired autonomy of the rational subject. The modern subject is simultaneously dependent upon and constructed in opposition to imagination, and the resulting ambivalence about the faculty is one of the fundamental conditions of modern models of subjectivity.

Schlutz's readings of the Romantic poet-philosophers Coleridge and Hardenberg highlight that also their texts are not free of fears about the faculty's disruptive potential and its connection to the body. While imagination is now openly enlisted to produce the aesthetic unity of subjectivity, it still threatens to unravel and destroy a subject that needs to keep the body and its desires at bay in order to secure its rational and moral autonomy. The dark abyss of a self not in control of its thoughts, feelings, and desires is not overcome by the philosophical glorification of the subject's powers of imagination.

The years of Jacksonian America from 1815-48 were arguably the richest period in American life. Award-winning historian David S. Reynolds illuminates the period's political transformation, casting fresh light on Andrew Jackson, who redefined the presidency, as well as John Quincy Adams and James K. Polk, who expanded the nation's territory and strengthened its position internationally. He captures the turbulence of a democracy caught in the throes of the slavery controversy, the rise of capitalism, and the birth of urbanization; reveals unknown dimensions of the Second Great Awakening with its sects, cults, and self-styled prophets; brings alive the reformers, abolitionists, and prohibitionists, who struggled to correct America's worst social ills; uncovers the political roots of some of America's greatest authors and artists, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edgar Allen Poe to Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand; and recreates the shocking phenomena that marked the age, including bloody duels and violent mobs. 

An authoritative new examination of John Brown and his deep impact on American history. Bancroft Prize-winning cultural historian David S. Reynolds presents an informative and richly considered new exploration of the paradox of a man steeped in the Bible but more than willing to kill for his abolitionist cause. Reynolds locates Brown within the currents of nineteenth-century life and compares him to modern terrorists, civil-rights activists, and freedom fighters. Ultimately, he finds neither a wild-eyed fanatic nor a Christ-like martyr, but a passionate opponent of racism so dedicated to eradicating slavery that he realized only blood could scour it from the country he loved. By stiffening the backbone of Northerners and showing Southerners there were those who would fight for their cause, he hastened the coming of the Civil War. This is a vivid and startling story of a man and an age on the verge of calamity.

Imagine Otherwise is an incisive critique of the field of Asian American studies. Recognizing that the rubric "Asian American" elides crucial differences, Kandice Chuh argues for reframing Asian American studies as a study defined not by its subjects and objects, but by its critique. Toward that end, she urges the foregrounding of the constructedness of "Asian American" formations and shows how this understanding of the field provides the basis for continuing to use the term "Asian American" in light of—and in spite of—contemporary critiques about its limitations.

Drawing on the insights of poststructuralist theory, postcolonial studies, and investigations of transnationalism, Imagine Otherwise conceives of Asian American literature and U.S. legal discourse as theoretical texts to be examined for the normative claims about race, gender, and sexuality that they put forth. Reading government and legal documents, novels including Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart, John Okada's No-No Boy, Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, Ronyoung Kim's Clay Walls, and Lois Ann Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging, and the short stories "Immigration Blues" by Bienvenido Santos and "High-Heeled Shoes" by Hisaye Yamamoto, Chuh works through Filipino American and Korean American identity formation and Japanese American internment during World War II as she negotiates the complex and sometimes tense differences that constitute 'Asian America' and Asian American studies.

Most critics of aestheticism focus on the Yellow Book, the glossy Victorian journal with the shocking yellow cover that counted among its contributors Aubrey Beardsley and Max Beerbohm. But one of the best-known aesthetes, Oscar Wilde, launched his own magazine, the Woman's World. The audience for Wilde's magazine reveals another side of the aesthetic movement that has been largely forgotten.

Every now-canonical male aesthete once competed with what Talia Schaffer calls the female aesthetes, whose critical and popular success made them formidable contemporaries. Not only did these women make significant contributions to the development of feminist ideologies; they pioneered new literary strategies that were incorporated by their canonical successors.

Schaffer analyzes writers who have never been considered together, including Lucas Malet (Mary Harrison), Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée), Alice Meynell, Rosamund Marriott Watson, Una Ashworth Taylor, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Mary and Jane Findlater, and John Oliver Hobbes (Pearl Craigie). These women used aestheticism to forge a compromise between the two models of female identity available to them--the New Woman and the Angel in the House. They developed plots, ideas, and styles that would later be adopted, parodied, or revised by canonical writers such as Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James. They used the "pretty" language of aestheticism as a strategic cover behind which they could attempt radical experiments, many of which prefigure modernist innovations.

Recovering the lost work of the female aesthetes forces us to reconsider the central tenets of late-Victorian literary history.

This collection of essays introduces new scholarship on the women novelists, poets, fiction writers, essayists, lifestyle experts, and critics who played a central and long-forgotten role in the history of aestheticism, the late nineteenth-century movement associated with "art for art's sake." Recovering the work of these women recasts aestheticism as a powerful and widespread cultural movement rather than the product of a few elite men. Aesthetic women were not just mystical models in jewel-toned draperies or passive consumers of blue china; they were remarkably sophisticated writers, such as Marie Corelli, Christina Rossetti, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Jekyll, engaged in challenging their own objectification and formulating new theories of art. These essays show how aestheticism offered both men and women a set of concepts and a vocabulary through which issues of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, exoticism, nature, the modern, economic productivity, commodity culture, mass culture, and high culture could be addressed.

Winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Ambassador Book Award and Finalist for the National for the Book Critics Circle Award

In his poetry Walt Whitman set out to encompass all of America and in so doing heal its deepening divisions. This magisterial biography demonstrates the epic scale of his achievement, as well as the dreams and anxieties that impelled it, for it places the poet securely within the political and cultural context of his age.

Combing through the full range of Whitman’s writing, David Reynolds shows how Whitman gathered inspiration from every stratum of nineteenth-century American life: the convulsions of slavery and depression; the raffish dandyism of the Bowery “b’hoys”; the exuberant rhetoric of actors, orators, and divines. We see how Whitman reconciled his own sexuality with contemporary social mores and how his energetic courtship of the public presaged the vogues of advertising and celebrity. Brilliantly researched, captivatingly told, Walt Whitman’s America is a triumphant work of scholarship that breathes new life into the biographical genre.

While Stevens was struggling in his poems to become a "platonic man," a beacon of planetary consciousness, he grew ever more abstracted from a wife who was slavishly dependent on him, and his sullen, rebellious teenage daughter fled the parental home for a marriage the poet angrily vetoed. Nevertheless, Richardson asks us to believe that Stevens, unlike Frost and Williams, was a poet wholly immersed in the demands of everyday life. Her empathetic attempt to humanize him often falters, and she stretches the slender evidence when she claims that this aloof idealist was a "naive socialist" in the 1930s who later espoused "commitment to the left." Despite its flaws, this companion to her acclaimed Wallace Stevens: The Early Years offers a noble, touching, insightful portrait of a writer who wielded imagination as his supreme instrument. Her close reading of his life and work illuminates the ways individual poems arose from his encounters with Freud, Plato, Nietzsche and his essential loneliness in a godless age.

Stevens claimed that he never read other poets, yet, as this massive biography reveals, he held imaginary dialogues with his favorite "man-poets," Hardy and Plato among them. A successful insurance executive and man of letters, he had a precarious sense of self and attempted in his verse to define an ideal self abstracted from his humdrum, bourgeois world. Combining psychobiography and criticism, this first half of a two-volume work argues that Stevens made his wife into a mother figure because he was unable to integrate the feminine into his psyche. The poet comes across as demanding, priggish, miserly, aloof, but the real subject here is the process of his mind, how his arresting images crystallized, and how they amplified or concealed his inner self. Richardson's dense, wordy study rewards the patient reader. No other book gets into the workings of Stevens's imagination so deeply. The author, a professor at City University of New York, has uncovered fascinating material on Stevens's meeting with Dada artist Duchamp and his borrowings from commedia dell'arte.