Michael Kennedy develops a theoretical conception of Soviet-type societies by analyzing Solidarity's significance on three levels. First, he explains the background to and nature of the conflict between Solidarity and the authorities by examining the relation between the distribution of power and movement strategies. Second, he considers the implications of Solidarity's struggle for the theory of the Soviet-type system's reproduction and transformation by offering a critique and synthesis of relevant theories of class and civil society. Third, he examines the internal constitution of...

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...

Though the term "San Francisco Renaissance" is usually associated with the Beat movement, it was in reality a collage of different communities, often at odds with one another, whose agendas were social and political as much as aesthetic. These subcommunities provided important contexts for subsequent counterculture developments such as gay liberation, feminism, and the New Left long before those movements attracted widespread public attention. In his study of these various impulses Michael Davidson devotes chapters to central figures such as Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, William Everson,...

The author shows how the societies of West Africa were transformed by the slave trade. The growth of the Atlantic trade stimulated the development of slavery within the region, with slaves working in the river and coasting trades or producing surplus grain to feed slaves in transit. A few held pivotal positions in the political structure of the coastal kingdoms of Senegambia. This local slave system had far-reaching consequences, leading to religious protest and slave rebellions. The changes in agricultural production fostered an ecological crisis.

When people are in a certain mood, whether elated or depressed, that mood is often communicated to others. When we are talking to someone who is depressed it may make us feel depressed, whereas if we talk to someone who is feeling self-confident and buoyant we are likely to feel good about ourselves. This phenomenon, known as emotional contagion, is identified here, and compelling evidence for its effects is offered from a variety of disciplines--social and developmental psychology, history, cross-cultural psychology, experimental psychology, and psychopathology. The authors propose a simple...

This original study offers clear but conceptually sophisticated readings of Keats' major poems that are informed by contemporary literary theory. Drawing on the recent growth in interest in the Romantic poets and their audiences, the book focuses on the relationship between narrative in Keats' poetry and its audience and readers, while also developing, more generally, a theory of reading for Romantic poetry.

Harriet Jacobs, today perhaps the single most read and studied Black American woman of the nineteenth century, has not until recently enjoyed sustained, scholarly analysis. This anthology presents a far-ranging compendium of literary and cultural scholarship that will take its place as the primary resource for students and teachers of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The contributors include both established Jacobs scholars and emerging critics; the essays take on a variety of subjects in Incidents, treating representation, gender, resistance, and spirituality from differing angles.

Salem Story engages the story of the Salem witch trials through an analysis of the surviving primary documentation and juxtaposes that against the way in which our culture has mythologized the events of 1692. Salem Story examines a variety of individual motives that converged to precipitate the witch hunt. The book also examines subsequent mythologies that emerged from the events of 1692. Of the many assumptions about the Salem Witch Trials, the most persistent one remains that they were precipitated by a circle of hysterical girls. Through an analysis of what actually happened, through...

Peter Gibian explores the key role played by Oliver Wendell Holmes, senior, in what was known as America's "Age of Conversation." Holmes' multivoiced writings can serve as a key to open up the closed interiors of Victorian America, whether in saloons or salons, parlors or clubs, hotels or boarding houses. Combining social, intellectual, medical, legal and literary history with close textual analysis, and setting Holmes in dialoge with Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Fuller and Alcott, Gibian radically redefines the context for our understanding of the major literary works of the American...

This work argues that Melville's relationship to the city is considerably more complex than has generally been believed. By placing him in the historical and cultural context of 19th-century New York, Kelley presents a Melville who borrows from the colourful cultural variety of the city while at the same time investigating its darker and more dangerous social aspects. Kelley shows that images both from Melville and from popular sources of the time represent New York variously as Capital, Labyrinth, City of God, and City of Man; she argues that Melville resists a generalizing or totalizing...