Edgar Allan Poe notoriously identified “the death . . . of a beautiful woman” as “the most poetical topic in the world.” Despite this cringeworthy claim, it is widely known that Poe drew creative inspiration from female authors and that women figure prominently among the artists and critics fascinated by the writer’s creative legacy. Filling a major gap in scholarship on Poe, this volume investigates the varied ways that women have influenced perceptions of Poe through biography, criticism...

Fashion Nation argues that popular images of the United States as a place of glitter and lights, of gaudy costumes and dizzying visual surfaces—usually understood as features of technomodernity—were in fact brewed in the rich, strange world of early nineteenth-century British and European folk nationalism when nations were compelled to offer visual manifestations of their allegedly true ancestral form. Showing that folk and ethnic nationalism played a central role in writing and c...

Industry and the Creative Mind takes a radically new look at the figure of the eccentric, alienated writer in American literature and entertainment from 1790 to 1860. Traditional scholarship takes for granted that the eccentric writer, modeled by such Romantic beings as Lord Byron and brought to life for American audiences by the gloomy person of Edgar Allan Poe, was a figure of rebellion against the excesses of modern commercial culture and industrial life. By contrast, Indus...

The Essays of Michel de Montaigne are contained in three books and 107 chapters of varying length. Montaigne's stated design in writing, publishing and revising the Essays over the period from approximately 1570 to 1592 was to record for the 'private benefit of friends and kinsmen ... some traits of my character and of my humours.' The Essays were first published in 1580 and cover a wide range of topics. As Essai is French for "trial" or "attempt", so Montaigne attempted to explore his tho...

After a fifteen-year hiatus from the world of guns, journalist, sports shooter, and former soldier A.J. Somerset no longer fit in with other firearm enthusiasts. Theirs was a culture much different than the one he remembered: a culture more radical, less tolerant, and more immovable in its beliefs, as if [each] gun had come with a free, bonus ideological Family Pack [of political tenets], a ready-made identity.” To find the origins of this surprising shift, Somerset began mapping the cult...

The Juvenilia are the early works of Jane Austen, small essays, poems or plays that she compiled in three hand-written notebooks. This edition includes the following works: Frederic & Elfrida Jack & Alice Edgar And Emma: A Tale Henry And Eliza The Adventures Of Mr. Harley Sir William Mountague Memoirs Of Mr. Clifford: An Unfinished Tale The Beautifull Cassandra Amelia Webster The Visit: A Comedy In Two Acts The Mystery: An Unfinished Comedy The Three Sisters ... and many more ...

On March 19, 2013, a distinguished group of writers and critics gathered at the Newark Museum’s Billy Johnson Auditorium in Newark, New Jersey, to celebrate the extraordinary career and lasting literary legacy of Philip Roth on the occasion of his 80th birthday. This keepsake volume gathers remarks from the evening’s speakers, a fitting tribute to the only living novelist whose work is collected in the Library of America series. Here you’ll find Jonathan Lethem, hilariously recounting his ...

The story of the Cheyenne Indians in the 1870s, and their bitter struggle to flee from the Indian Territory in Oklahoma back to their home in Wyoming and Montana.

This volume explores the confluences between two types of literature in contemporary America: the novel and the epic. It analyses the tradition of the epic as it has evolved from antiquity, through Joyce to its American manifestations and describes how this tradition has impacted upon contemporary American writing.

Emory University professor Sally Wolff has carried on a fifty-year tradition of leading students on expeditions to "Faulkner country" in and around Oxford, Mississippi. Not long ago, she decided to invite alumni on one of these field trips. One response to the invitation surprised her: "I can't go on the trip. But I knew William Faulkner." They were the words of Dr. Edgar Wiggin Francisco III, and in talking with Wolff he revealed that as a child in the 1930s and 1940s he did indeed know F...

The print culture of the early twentieth century has become a major area of interest in contemporary Modernist Studies. Modernism's Print Cultures surveys the explosion of scholarship in this field and provides an incisive, well-informed guide for students and scholars alike. Surveying the key critical work of recent decades, the book explores such topics as:- Periodical publishing – from 'little magazines' such as Rhythm to glossy publications such as Vanity ...

Great Plains Literature is an exploration of influential literature of the Plains region in both the United States and Canada. It reflects the destruction of the culture of the first people who lived there, the attempts of settlers to conquer the land, and the tragic losses and successes of settlement that are still shaping our modern world of environmental threat, ethnic and racial hostilities, declining rural communities, and growing urban populations.In addition to feat...