During the 1930s the Work Progress Administration funded the Federal Theater Project to sustain unemployed theatrical workers in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other major urban centers, employing over 12,000 people and presenting countless productions. Some of the most popular and memorable of these works, such as the "voodoo" Macbeth and the "swing" Mikado, were produced in the so-called Negro Units, whose story is narrated in this book. Particular focus is given to problems of representation in a community and in an era trying to define what was African American, what was Negro, what...

This is a historical critique of Henry James in relation to nineteenth-century feminism and women's fiction. Habegger has brought to light extensive new documentation on James's tangled connections with what was thought and written about women in his time. The emphasis is equally on his life and on his fictions. This is the first book to investigate his father's bizarre lifelong struggle with free love and feminism, a struggle that played a major role in shaping James. The book also shows how seriously he distorted the truth about the cousin, Minnie Temple, whose self-assertive image inspired...

Part biography and part literary history, this book is about the experience of the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens in the 1930s. Stevens is generally thought to have antagonized, even enraged, the young literary radicals of the period; his long poem, "Owl's Clover", has been generally understood as a negative, even bitter response to leftist aesthetics. Using the archives of many little-known political poets, Alan Filreis offers a detailed description of various literary-political battles, in which the very texture of the positions taken up in the movement between left and right...

Flannery O'Connor and Cold War Culture offers a radically new reading of O'Connor, who is known primarily as the creator of "universal" religious dramas. By recovering the historical context in which O'Connor wrote her fiction, Jon Lance Bacon reveals an artist deeply concerned with the issues that engaged other producers of American culture from the 1940s to the 1960s: a national identity, political anxiety, and intellectual freedom. Bacon takes an interdisciplinary approach, relating the stories and novels to political texts and sociological studies, as well as films, television programs,...

Jeffrey Hammond's study of the funeral elegies of early New England reassesses a body of poems whose importance in their own time has been obscured by almost total neglect in ours. Hammond reconstructs the historical, theological and cultural contexts of these poems to demonstrate how they responded to Puritan views on a specific process of mourning. The elegies emerge, he argues, as performative scripts that consoled readers by shaping their experience. They shed new light on the emotional dimension of Puritanism and the important role of ritual in Puritan culture.

Joan Richardson provides a fascinating and compelling account of the emergence of the quintessential American philosophy: pragmatism. She demonstrates pragmatism's engagement with various branches of the natural sciences and traces the development of Jamesian pragmatism from the late nineteenth century through modernism, following its pointings into the present. Richardson combines strands from America's religious experience with scientific information to offer interpretations that break new ground in literary and cultural history. This book exemplifies the value of interdisciplinary...

From the 1890s onward, Edward S. Curtis took thousands of photographs of Native Americans all over the West. These were published (1907-1930) in twenty volumes of illustrated text and twenty portfolios of photographs; the project was supported by Theodore Roosevelt and funded in part by J. Pierpont Morgan, and spawned exhibitions, postcards, magazine articles, lecture series, a "musicale," and the very first narrative documentary film. Neither a eulogy to Curtis' achievement nor a debunking of it, this book is an honest study of the project as a collective whole.

As a central icon of political and cultural democracy, the crowd occupies a prominent place in the American literary and cultural landscape. Mary Esteve examines a range of writing by Poe, Hawthorne, Du Bois, James, and Stephen Crane to provide a study of crowd representations in American literature from the antebellum era to the early twentieth century. She argues that these writers examined the aesthetic and political meanings of urban crowd scenes.

Why did the figure of "the girl" come to dominate the American imagination from the middle of the nineteenth century into the twentieth? Peter Stoneley looks at how women were fictionalized for the girl reader as ways of achieving a powerful social and cultural presence. Covering a wide range of works and writers, this book is of interest to cultural and literary scholars.

Ralph Bauer presents a comparative investigation of colonial prose narratives in Spanish and British America from 1542 to 1800. Bauer analyzes narratives of shipwreck, captivity, and travel, as well as imperial and natural histories of the New World in the context of transformative early modern scientific ideologies. He reviews the narrative models promoted by the "New Sciences" during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries within the context of the geopolitical question of how knowledge can be centrally controlled in outwardly expanding empires.