Reimagining Thoreau synthesizes the interests of the intellectual and psychological biographer and the literary critic in a reconsideration of Thoreau's literary career. The aims of the book are, first, to situate Thoreau's aims and achievements as a writer within the context of his troubled relationship to the microcosm of antebellum Concord; second, to reinterpret Walden as a temporally layered text in light of the successive drafts of the book and the evidence of Thoreau's journals and contemporaneous writings; and third, to overturn traditional views of Thoreau's "decline" by offering a...

This book juxtaposes representations of labor in fictional texts with representations of labor in nonfictional texts in order to trace the intersections between aesthetic and economic discourse in nineteenth-century America. This intersection is particularly evident in the debates about symbol and allegory, and Cindy Weinstein contends that allegory during this period was critiqued on precisely the same grounds as mechanized labor. In the course of completing a historical investigation, Weinstein revolutionizes the notion of allegorical narrative, which is exposed as a literary medium of...

Interpreting specific poems by some of the best known Chicano writers, this book studies the central aesthetic and thematic concerns recent Chicano poetry addresses. Drawing on current theories of postmodernity and postcoloniality, it places a "minority" literature within the central concerns of contemporary literary and cultural studies. The book addresses the most important issues related to Chicano identity, especially focusing on the contribution women writers and thinkers have made in articulating this identity.

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.

In this book, Rachel Blau DuPlessis shows how, through poetic language, modernist writers represented the debates around such social issues of modernity as suffrage, sexuality, manhood, and African-American and Jewish subjectivities. DuPlessis engages with the work of such canonical poets as Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore and H. D., as well as Mina Loy, Countee Cullen, Alfred Kreymborg and Langston Hughes, writers still marginalized by existing constructions of modernism.

In this book, Rachel Blau DuPlessis shows how, through poetic language, modernist writers represented the debates around such social issues of modernity as suffrage, sexuality, manhood, and African-American and Jewish subjectivities. DuPlessis engages with the work of such canonical poets as Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore and H. D., as well as Mina Loy, Countee Cullen, Alfred Kreymborg and Langston Hughes, writers still marginalized by existing constructions of modernism.

Approaching post-World War II poetry from a postmodern critical perspective, this study challenges the prevailing assumption that experimental forms signify political opposition while traditional forms are politically conservative. It defines postmodern poetry as a break with modernism's valorization of technique and its implicit collusion with technological progress. It shows how four major postwar poets Frank O'Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, and James Merrill cannot be read as politically conservative because formally traditional or as culturally oppositional because formally...

In this study, Blair challenges Henry James' perceived status as the literary figurehead of an impregnable high culture. Emphasizing James' engagement in forms of popular culture (including ethnography, minstrelsy, photography, and journalism), Blair traces the ways in which his writing, steeped in these forms, acted as a force in the forging of racial, national, and cultural identity.

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.

Early Native American Writing is a collection of critical essays discussing the works of American Indian authors who wrote between 1630 and 1940 and produced some of the earliest literature in North American history. The first collection of critical essays that concentrates on this body of writing, this book highlights the writings of the American Indian authors considered, many only recently rediscovered, as important contributions to American letters.