Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), the novel born from Edwidge Danticat's childhood in Haiti and immigration to New York City, was one of the great literary debuts of recent times, marking the emergence of an impressive talent in addition to opening up an entire culture to a broad general readership.
William Faulkner emerged from the ravaged South-half backwoods, half defeated empire-transforming his corner of Mississippi into the fictional Yoknapatawpha County and bestowing on the world some of the most revolutionary and enduring literature of the twentieth century.
The "e;black family"e; in the United States and the Caribbean often holds contradictory and competing meanings in public discourse: on the one hand, it is a site of love, strength, and support; on the other hand, it is a site of pathology, brokenness, and dysfunction that has frequently called forth an emphasis on conventional respectability if stability and social approval are to be achieved.
Would it surprise you to learn that there was a contemporary of Ernest Hemingway's who, in his romantic questing and hell-or-high-water pursuit of life and his art, was closer to the Hemingwayesque ideal than Hemingway himself?
Infamous for authoring two concepts since favored by government powers seeking license for ruthlessness-the utilitarian notion of privileging the greatest happiness for the most people and the panopticon-Jeremy Bentham is not commonly associated with political emancipation.
The Antilles remain a society preoccupied with gradations of skin color and with the social hierarchies that largely reflect, or are determined by, racial identity.
In the long nineteenth century, Argentine and Cuban reformers invited white women from the United States to train teachers as replacements for their countries' supposedly unfit mothers.
With the ascendancy of neoliberalism in American culture beginning in the 1960s, the political structures governing private lives became more opaque and obscure.
Across the eighteenth century in Britain, readers, writers, and theater-goers were fascinated by women who dressed in men's clothing-from actresses on stage who showed their shapely legs to advantage in men's breeches to stories of valiant female soldiers and ruthless female pirates.
A hierarchical model of human societies' relations with the natural world is at the root of today's climate crisis; Narrating the Mesh contends that narrative form is instrumental in countering this ideology.
Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the increasing accuracy and legibility of cartographic projections, the proliferation of empirically based chorographies, and the popular vogue for travel narratives served to order, package, and commodify space in a manner that was critical to the formation of a unified Britain.
From Homer to Tim O'Brien, war literature remains largely the domain of male writers, and traditional narratives imply that the burdens of war are carried by men.
Saul Steinberg's inimitable drawings, paintings, and assemblages enriched the New Yorker, gallery and museum shows, and his own books for more than half a century.
Evangelical Gothic explores the bitter antagonism that prevailed between two defining institutions of nineteenth-century Britain: Evangelicalism and the popular novel.
When British and American leaders today talk of the nation-whether it is Boris Johnson, Barack Obama, or Donald Trump-they do so, in part, in terms established by eighteenth-century British literature.
The South African literature of iimbongi, the oral poets of the amaXhosa people, has long shaped understandings of landscape and history and offered a forum for grappling with change.
By the end of volume 1 of The Life of William Faulkner ("e;A filling, satisfying feast for Faulkner aficianados"e;- Kirkus), the young Faulkner had gone from an unpromising, self-mythologizing bohemian to the author of some of the most innovative and enduring literature of the century, including The Sound and the Fury and Light in August.
In 1979, the Marxist-Leninist New Jewel Movement under Maurice Bishop overthrew the government of the Caribbean island country of Grenada, establishing the People's Revolutionary Government.
In addition to being a poet, fiction writer, playwright, and essayist, Langston Hughes was also a globe-trotting cosmopolitan, travel writer, translator, avid international networker, and-perhaps above all-pan-Africanist.
A paradox haunts the bildungsroman: few protagonists successfully complete the process of maturation and socialization that ostensibly defines the form.
Accounts of the rise of American literature often start in the 1850s with a cluster of "e;great American novels"e;-Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Melville's Moby-Dick and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.
In 1850, the legendary Koh-i-noor diamond, gem of Eastern potentates, was transferred from the Punjab in India and, in an elaborate ceremony, placed into Queen Victoria's outstretched hands.
The dandy, a nineteenth-century character and concept exemplified in such works as Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, reverberates in surprising corners of twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture.
After the Revolution, Americans realized they lacked the common, deep, or meaningful history that might bind together their loose confederation of former colonies into a genuine nation.
Water Graves considers representations of lives lost to water in contemporary poetry, fiction, theory, mixed-media art, video production, and underwater sculptures.
William Faulkner emerged from the ravaged South-half backwoods, half defeated empire-transforming his corner of Mississippi into the fictional Yoknapatawpha County and bestowing on the world some of the most revolutionary and enduring literature of the twentieth century.
A scholarly and imaginative reconstruction of the voyage Daniel Defoe took from the pillory to literary immortality, The Shortest Way with Defoe contends that Robinson Crusoe contains a secret satire, written against one person, that has gone undetected for 300 years.
Taking its cue from Perry Miller's 1956 classic of American literary criticism, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville, Caroline Chamberlin Hellman's new book examines ways in which contemporary multi-ethnic writers of the United States have responded to nineteenth- and early twentieth century texts historically central to the American literary canon.
The eighteenth century has generally been understood as the Age of Print, when the new medium revolutionized the literary world and rendered manuscript culture obsolete.
From Zora Neale Hurston to Derek Walcott to Toni Morrison, New World black authors have written about African-derived religious traditions and spiritual practices.
For many Spanish Americans in the early nineteenth century, Philadelphia was Filadelfia, a symbol of republican government for the Americas and the most important Spanish-language print center in the early United States.
The nineteenth-century sciences cleaved sensory experience into two separate realms: the bodily physics of sensation and the mental activity of perception.
Long overlooked, the natural philosophy and theosophy of the Scandinavian scientist-turned-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) made a surprising impact in America.
