In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Lost Cause gave white southerners a new collective identity anchored in the stories, symbols, and rituals of the defeated Confederacy. Historians have used the i
In 1984, Joyce Rockwood Hudson accompanied her husband, anthropologist Charles Hudson, on a 4,000-mile trek across the Southeast. His objective was to retrace and verify the route taken by Hernando de
Just days before Christmas 1989, bombs delivered through the U.S. mail exploded in two southern states, taking the lives of a federal judge in Alabama and a civil rights attorney in Georgia. The same
Virtually unknown for the better part of the twentieth century, Pauline E. Hopkins (1859-1930) is one of the most interesting rediscoveries of recent African American literary history. This is the fir
In her second collection, Idra Novey steps in and out of jails, courthouses, and caves to explore what confinement means in the twenty-first century. From the beeping doors of a prison in New York to
In antebellum America, both North and South emerged as modernizing, capitalist societies. Work bells, clock towers, and personal timepieces increasingly instilled discipline on one’s day, which alread
James Habersham was an early American success story. After arriving in Savannah in 1738, he failed in his efforts to wrest a living from the Georgia wilderness and lived his first year at public expen
Early environmental writers provided American settlers with an idealistic conception of their place in the New World, and in the process they mystified our relationship to the land. David Mazel now ta
When Ina Dillard Russell died in 1953, flags throughout Georgia were lowered to half-mast in honor of her dedication to her state, community, and family. Roots and Ever Green is the engaging true stor
This is the most thorough and comprehensive biography to date of writer and activist Paul Green (1894-1981). Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his play In Abraham's Bosom and author of the pioneering s
Leaving Saturn, chosen by Al Young as the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, is an ambitious and honest collection. Major Jackson, through both formal and free verse poems, renders visible the spi
In this collection of 17 essays written over an eight-year period, Kirby (English, Florida State U.) addresses issues related to the making and consuming of literature. Topics include the characterist
Invisible Men focuses on the tremendous growth of periodical literature from 1850 to 1910 to illustrate how Victorian and Edwardian thought and culture problematized fatherhood within the family. Draw
In his day, Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813–1892) was a well-known figure in American arts and letters, with close ties to the New England Transcendentalists. His most enduring achievements are his no
In his essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill writes that a person “whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steamengine has a character.” Although Mill never devoted a
Defoe and Fictional Time shows Defoe’s relevance to issues now central to criticism of the novel; relationships between narrative time and clock time, the influence of time concepts shared by writers
At the turn of the twentieth century, representations of “white collar” Americans—the “middle” social strata H. L. Mencken ridiculed as boobus Americanus—took on an ever-greater prominence within Amer
Drawing primarily from previously unpublished manuscripts in the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association Collection in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, recent editions of Emerson’s corresp
Analyzing the historical contexts in which female Gothic novels and slave narratives were composed, Kari J. Winter shows that both types of writing expose the sexual politics at the heart of patriarch
In the three decades after 1885, a virtual explosion in the nation’s print media—newspaper tabloids, inexpensive magazines, and best-selling books—vaulted the American writer to unprecedented heights
