Afrocentrism and its history have long been disputed and controversial. In this important book, Wilson Moses presents a critical and nuanced view of the issues. Tracing the origins of Afrocentrism since the eighteenth century, he examines the combination of various popular mythologies, some of them mystical and sentimental, others perfectly reasonable. A level presentation in what is often a shouting match, Afrotopia is a rich history of black intellectual life and the concept of race.

Throughout the nineteenth century, American authors such as Henry James, William Dean Howells, and Noah Webster displayed a fascination with women's speech--describing how women's voices sound, what happens when women speak, and what reactions their speech produces, especially in their male listeners. Voices of the Nation argues that closer inspection of these recurring descriptions also performed political work that has had a profound--though unspecified to date--impact on American culture.

Gregg Crane examines the interaction between civic identity and race and justice within American law and literature in this study. He recounts the efforts of literary and legal figures to bring the nation's law in accord with the moral consensus that slavery and racial oppression are evil. Covering such writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass, and a range of novelists, poets, philosophers, politicians, lawyers and judges, this original book will revise the relationship between race and nationalism in American literature.

Covenant and Republic investigates the cultural politics of historical memory in the early American republic, specifically the historical literature of Puritanism. By situating historical writing about Puritanism in the context of the cultural forces of Republicanism and liberalism, this study reconsiders the emergence of the historical romance in the 1820s, before the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne. This book not only aids the Americanist recovery of this literary period, but also brings together literary studies of historical fiction and historical scholarship of early Republican political...

The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism overturns many of our long-held assumptions about the social and artistic values of Protestantism. Dr Ann Kibbey offers a detailed analysis of the rhetoric of the Puritan plain style, centring her argument on the influential preacher John Cotton and discloses a general theory of figuration in the Protestant tradition that has been overlooked by literary critics, historians and sociologists alike. The author explores the immense variety of ways in which early Protestants in Europe and America granted significance to material shapes. Kibbery...

In Cross Examinations of Law and Literature Brook Thomas uses legal thought and legal practice as a lens through which to read some of the important fictions of antebellum America. The lens reflects both ways, and we learn as much about the literature in the context of contemporary legal concerns as we do about the legal ideologies that the fiction subverts or reveals. Successive chapters deal with Cooper's Pioneers and Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables (property law and the image of the judiciary), Melville's "Benito Cereno" and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (slavery), Melville's White...

This book suggests a new interpretation of the characteristic qualities of Scottish and American literatures. Professor Manning reveals the "puritan-provincial vision": a particular way of looking at life and man's relationship to what lies beyond himself.

Ezra Pound's vocal support for Benito Mussolini and Italian fascism and his indictment, arrest, and imprisonment without trial have been a source of considerable puzzlement and embarrassment to an entire generation of poets and critics. In this book, Tim Redman draws from previously unexamined and unpublished archival material, to provide the first detailed and historical account of Pound's support for Italian fascism. Beginning with Pound's earliest political journalism for the socialist paper The New Age during the First World War, the book traces Pound's growing interest in the economic...

Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities examines the crossing of literary and social forces that forms the context for being Chicano. Heterotextual poetics reveals how a poetry of the cross can influence identity, in readings ranging from the poetry of gender and race by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz to that of the fragmentary, postmodern subject of Juan Felipe Herrara. Heterotextuality is the medium in which xicanismo is articulated and comes to be a hybrid subject of textual difference.

Blackness and Value investigates the principles by which "value" operates, and asks if it is useful to imagine that the concepts of racial blackness and whiteness in the United States operate in terms of these principles. Testing these concepts by exploring various theoretical approaches and their shortcomings, Lindon Barrett finds that the gulf between "the street" (where race is acknowledged as a powerful enigma) and the literary academy (where until recently it has not been) can be understood as a symptom of racial violence. While commonly approaches to race and value are examined...