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Medieval America
Medieval America analyzes literary, legal, and historical archives that help tell a new story about the formation of American culture. Against Cold War–era studies of U.S. culture that argued, following political scientist Louis Hartz’s “liberal consensus” model, that the United States emerged from the Revolutionary era free from Europe’s feudal institutions and uninterested in the production of its medieval culture productions, Robert Yusef Rabiee contends that feudal law and medieval literature were structural components of the American cultural imaginary in the nineteenth century. The racial, gender, and class formations that emerged in the first era of U.S. nation building were...
Capital's Grave
Bringing together analyses from different fields-law, technology, Marxism, and psychoanalysis-Jodi Dean shows the direction the contemporary world is heading: neofeudalism. Feudalism isn't just a metaphor. It's the operating system for the present. Politics and plunder thrive in the capitalist pursuit of profit, and the many are bound to serve the few, coerced into a system of rents, destruction, and hoarding driven by privilege and dependence. The question is: In a society of serfs and servants, how do we get free? With the rise of neofeudalism, and as more and more workers are drawn into the service sector-from nurses to Uber and delivery drivers-Dean argues that we can see the emergence of a new vanguard, the class that can lead the struggle for liberation from oppression and exploitation: what she calls the servant vanguard.
Entangled Worlds
"Far from a stagnant Middle Ages, the years 600-1350 witnessed globalization and social innovation. Entangled Worlds explores long-distance trade in the Americas, cosmopolitan effects of Islamic and Mongol expansion, the spread of Christian and Sinitic models of culture and social organization, and the birth of settled political order in South Asia."--
The Conservative Aesthetic
The Conservative Aesthetic: Theodore Roosevelt, Popular Darwinism, and the American Literary West offers an alternative origin story for American conservatism, tracing it to a circle of writers, artists, and thinkers in the late nineteenth century who yoked popular understandings of Darwin to western literary aesthetics. That circle included writer Owen Wister, artist Frederic Remington, entertainer William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, historian Frederick Jackson Turner, and a young Theodore Roosevelt. The book explores how their lives and their writing intertwined with their conservative sensibilities. For them, going west was akin to time travel, a retrogression into an earlier and hardier age. It was through those retrogressions into the American state of nature, they imagined, that society could discover its finest and fittest citizens. Such a society would be the modern realization of Thomas Jefferson’s century-old dream of a “natural aristocracy.” Theirs was a new conservatism, rooted not in a history of European monarchy but rather in stories about American individualism and the frontier west, updated for the age of Darwin.
Left in the West
In this edited collection, Gioia Woods and her contributors bring together histories, biographies, close readings, and theories about the literary and cultural Left in the American West—as it is distinct from the more often-theorized literary left in major eastern metropolitan centers. Left in the West expands our understanding of what constitutes the literary left in the U.S. by including writers, artists, and movements not typically considered within the traditional context of the literary left. In doing so, it provides a new understanding of the region’s place among global and political ideologies. From the early 19th century to the present, a remarkably complex and varied body of lit...
Authorship, Activism and Celebrity
Since long before the age of celebrity activism, literary authors have used their public profiles and cultural capital to draw attention to a wide range of socio-political concerns. This book is the first to explore – through history, criticism and creative interventions – the relationship between authorship, political activism and celebrity culture across historical periods, cultures, literatures and media. It brings together scholars, industry stakeholders and prominent writer-activists to engage in a conversation on literary fame and public authority. These scholarly essays, interviews, conversations and opinion pieces interrogate the topos of the artist as prophet and acute critic of...
Liberalism, Theology, and the Performative in Antebellum American Literature
The 1850s United States witnessed a far-reaching political, social, and economic crisis. Symptomatic of this, a wide range of narrative fiction from sentimental novels to sensational drama identifies a foundational link between liberal institutions and performative utterances. Auctions, trials, marriages, and contracts, this fiction contends, all depend on the self-constituting authority of words and performances which anybody and everybody can appropriate and are always subject to misfiring. Rather than viewing this as a liberatory and egalitarian political force, however, writers from Herman Melville and James Fenimore Cooper to Captain Mayne Reid and E.D.E.N. Southworth insist that such n...
A Burning House
Despite the civil rights progress he fought for and saw on the horizon in the 1950s and '60s, Martin Luther King Jr.—increasingly concerned by America's moral vision, admitted—"I've come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house." In A Burning House, Brandon Washington contends that American Evangelicalism is a house ablaze: burning in the destructive fires of discrimination and injustice. The stain of segregation remains prevalent, not only in our national institutions, but also in our churches, and this has long tarnished the witness of Christianity and hampered our progress toward a Christ-like vision of Shalom—peace, justice, and wholeness—in the world. Common doctr...
Edgar Allan Poe and His Nineteenth-Century American Counterparts
Winner of the 2019 Patrick F. Quinn Award for the best book on Poe (awarded by the Poe Studies Association) Edgar Allan Poe and His Nineteenth-Century American Counterparts addresses Poe's connections with, critical assessments of, borrowings from, and effect on his literary peers. It situates Poe within his own time and place, paying particular attention to his interactions with, and impact on, figures such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Harriet Jacobs, and Pauline Hopkins. John Cullen Gruesser rebuts myths that continue to cling to Poe, demonstrates Poe's ability to transform themes he encountered in the works of his literary contemporaries into great literature, and establishes the profound influence of Poe's invention of detective fiction on nineteenth-century American writers.
Chaucer and the Invention of Biblical Narrative
Demonstrating how Chaucer uses the Bible in The Canterbury Tales as an authoritative literary source and model for his own literary production, this book explores the ways in which the Bible was a key tool for Chaucer's self-definition and innovation as an author. Chad Schrock unravels Chaucer's Tales in the light of topics important to biblical reception in 14th-century England: authority, textuality, interpretation, translation, rephrasing and marginalia. When the Canterbury Tales are summed up in this way, they show the great extent to which Chaucer was drawing upon the Bible as a meta-poetical resource for his own poetry – its fictional tale-tellers and characters, its quotations, allu...
