and... and... and...

How the legacy of the Civil War--as presented by writers, poets, and artists of the time--has shaped American visions of democracy In Haunted by the Civil War, Shirley Samuels explores the work of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others to investigate the long cultural shadow of America's cataclysmic sundering. Juxtaposing these texts with images--ranging from paintings by Winslow Homer to newspaper and magazine illustrations of political controversies--Samuels argues that the Civil War still haunts our attitudes toward democracy. The recent toppling of Confederate monuments, the continuing protests over racial and sexual discrimination, immigration, and Indigenous land rights: each of these forms part of the war's legacy. Examining the fraught deliberations about an ideal American democracy in the early republic, Samuels turns to the language of sensation in the poetry of Melville, Dickinson, and Whitman alongside Lincol

Virginia Woolf's first fully realized work of fiction--published in its final, revised form for the first time A beguiling trio of fantastical and farcical anti-fairy tales about a giantess who builds a magical "cottage of one's own," battles a silver-scaled sea monster, and defies governesses and gravity alike In 1907, eight years before she published her first novel, a twenty-five-year-old Virginia Woolf drafted three interconnected comic stories chronicling the adventures of a giantess named Violet--a teasing tribute to Woolf's friend Mary Violet Dickinson. But it was only in 2022 that Woolf scholar Urmila Seshagiri discovered a final, revised typescript of the stories. The typescript revealed that Woolf had finished this mock-biography, making it her first fully realized literary experiment and a work that anticipates her later masterpieces. Published here for the first time in its final form, The Life of Violet blends fantasy, fairy tale, and satire as it transports readers into a