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.
Syphilis was a prevalent affliction in the era of the Americas' colonization, creating widespread anxiety that is indicated in the period's literature across numerous fields.
Attacks against the pursuit of profit in eighteenth-century Britain have been largely read as reactions against market activity in general or as critiques of financial innovation.
Because of their respective histories of colonization and independence, the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic has developed into the largest economy of the Caribbean, while Haiti, occupying the western side of their shared island of Hispaniola, has become one of the poorest countries in the Americas.
A transatlantic phenomenon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the "e;New Woman"e; broke away from many of the constraints of the Victorian era to enjoy a greater freedom of movement in the social, physical, and intellectual realms.
"e;England may with justice claim to be the native land of transfusion,"e; wrote one European physician in 1877, acknowledging Great Britain's crucial role in developing and promoting human-to-human transfusion as treatment for life-threatening blood loss.
From Robinson Crusoe's cave to Henry Selwyn's hermitage, the domestic interior tells a story about "e;things"e; and their relation to character and identity.
Shortlisted for the Indie Book Awards, Christopher Bland Prize and The People's Book PrizeA Waterstones Best Memoir of 2024An Independent and Stylist Best Non-Fiction BookThe captivating true story of an underdog business - a feminist bookshop founded in Thatcher's Britain - from a woman at the heart of the women's liberation movement.
For more than eighty years, Faulkner criticism has attempted to "e;see all Yoknapatawpha,"e; the fictional Mississippi county in which the author set all but four of his novels as well as more than fifty short stories.
Drawing on tourist literature, travelogues, and local-color fiction about the South, Bill Hardwig tracks the ways in which the nation's leading interdisciplinary periodicals, especially the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and the Century, translated and broadcast the predominant narratives about the late-nineteenth-century South.
Adopting the term "e;new death,"e; which was used to describe the unprecedented and horrific scale of death caused by the First World War, Pearl James uncovers several touchstones of American modernism that refer to and narrate traumatic death.
In an original contribution to the psychoanalytic approach to literature, Doreen Fowler focuses on the fiction of four major American writers-William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison-to examine the father's function as a "e;border figure.
Exploring the fate of the ideal of the English gentleman once the empire he was meant to embody declined, Praseeda Gopinath argues that the stylization of English masculinity became the central theme, focus, and conceit for many literary texts that represented the "e;condition of Britain"e; in the 1930s and the immediate postwar era.
Given its affinity with questions of identity, autobiography offers a way into the interior space between author and reader, especially when writers define themselves in terms of religion.
Before the rise of private homes as we now understand them, the realm of personal, private, and local relations in England was the parish, which was also the sphere of poverty management.
Often thought of as the quintessential home or the Eden from which humanity has fallen, the natural world has long been a popular object of nostalgic narratives.
Since the 1980s, many activists and writers have turned from identity politics toward ethnic religious traditions to rediscover and reinvigorate their historic role in resistance to colonialism and oppression.
Across the centuries, the acts and arts of black heroism have inspired a provocative, experimental, and self-reflexive intellectual, political, and aesthetic tradition.
In a comparative and interdisciplinary analysis of modern and postmodern literature, film, art, and visual culture, Monika Kaup examines the twentieth century's recovery of the baroque within a hemispheric framework embracing North America, Latin America, and U.
In recent years, a series of major collections of posthumous writings by Elizabeth Bishop--one of the most widely read and discussed poets of the twentieth century--have been published, profoundly affecting how we look at her life and work.
