While it is obvious that America's state and local governments were consistently active during the nineteenth century, a period dominated by laissez-faire, political historians of twentieth-century America have assumed that the national government did very little during this period. A Government Out of Sight challenges this premise, chronicling the ways in which the national government interven…
The understanding of the United States—its history, its traditions, even the distinctly American voice—is largely determined by literature. Gathered in this rewarding and thought-provoking book are poems that have been essential components of our common American culture, from the earliest days of the nation through canonic works of the nineteenth century and up to the present day. 100 Essen…
The Train That Had Wings presents modern life in Kerala in terms of a shared but tragically compromised humanity. Mukundan dares to look beneath the routines and facades of everyday life in order to probe depth of sin, greed, and hypocrisy but also to rediscover what brings joy and hope.Sixteen short story translations and a critical introduction, offering examples of Mukundan's realistic, exis…
The outpouring of creative expression known as the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s spawned a burgeoning number of black-owned cultural outlets, including publishing houses, performance spaces, and galleries. Central to the movement were its poets, who in concert with editors, visual artists, critics, and fellow writers published a wide range of black verse and advanced new theories a…
Why did the novel become so popular in the past three centuries, and how did the American novel contribute to this trend? As a key provider of the narrative frames and formulas needed by modern individuals to give meaning and mooring to their lives. Drawing on phenomenological hermeneutics, human geography and social psychology, Laura Bieger contends that belonging is not a given; it is continu…
This collection of essays offers evolutionary psychological analysis of selected works from the American literary tradition. Application of evolutionary theory to writing by Ben Franklin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, F. Scot Fitzgerald, Zora Neal Hurston, and others creates an interdisciplinary framework for examining key textual features: plot, theme, tone, set…
In Black Dragon, Zachary F. Price illuminates martial arts as a site of knowledge exchange between Black, Asian, and Asian American people and cultures to offer new insights into the relationships among these groups. Drawing on case studies that include Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s appearance in Bruce Lee’s film Game of Death, Ron Van Clief and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Wu-Tang…
Decolonizing Diasporas proposes a new way to read the literary and cultural productions of the Afro-Atlantic. Mapping literature from Spanish-speaking Sub-Saharan African and Afro-Latinx Caribbean diasporas, Figueroa-Vásquez argues that the works of diasporic writers and artists offer ways of imagining new worldviews which dismantle the logics of colonial modernity. Utilizing women of color fe…
The American Short Story Cycle shows the roots of modernism and postmodernism winds through the short story cycle. Reviewers ranging from the The New York Times to Amazon do not know what to call books like Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad or Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth. Why do such popular and acclaimed books spark debates about what they are and how they should be read? The …
Felice D. Blake's Black Love, Black Hate: Intimate Antagonisms in African American Literature highlights the pervasive representations of intraracial deceptions, cruelties, and contempt in Black literature. Literary criticism has tended to focus on Black solidarity and the ways that a racially linked fate has compelled Black people to counter notions of Black inferiority with unified notions of…