2006-05-01,Robin DeRosa,Assimilation and Subversion in Earlier American Literature,Hardback,9781904303848,29.99,"Assimilation and Subversion in Earlier American Literature is a collection of essays that explores the complex interplay between dominance and oppression. Spanning the “long” early American period, the collection considers texts written from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Native Americans, Puritan ministers and Puritan “whores,” Barbadian and transatlantic slaves: the early American figures who populate these essays are talking about power, and creating—in writing—a dynamic and complicated relationship between the mainstream and the margin. The essays in this collection offer a collective paradigm for thinking about these issues, one in which “assimilation” and “subversion” are not so much oppositional as they are closely aligned, codependent, and mutually defining. Though these essays do maintain the dialectical play between the two terms, they offer new ways to think about dialectic itself. The goal of the collection is to give readers useful models for approaching texts by nondominant subjects, models that consider the polyphonic flow of power and the possibility of simultaneous multiple, conflicting, and even oppositional effects of oppression. The collection begins by looking at complex representations of the Christianized Native American, moves through a discussion of “creolized” West Indian and “converted” African slave narratives, explores the ironic uses of sentimentality in a nineteenth-century novel about slavery, and ends with a study of female criminality and the way that it both subverted and reinscribed dominant Puritan orthodoxy. The liminal spaces where assimilation becomes subversion (and vice versa) go by many difference names in this collection: the contact zone, the transcultured, the hybrid, the syncretic, the zombie, the pardodic, the parabolic, the transgressive, the framed. Each of the contributors works to find ways to describe this space without simultaneously closing it down. It can be a significant rhetorical challenge to articulate what might ultimately be a paradox, but this collection aims not only to look at familiar texts in new ways, but also to think about the critical process in a new way. In what ways does the critic’s own explication of a text undermine and stabilize the text’s coherent meaning? This is, in many ways, a collection that investigates this methodological question even as it focuses on the nature of power and how “the oppressed” write their way into and out of their own oppression. Contributors include John J. Kucich, Ann M. Brunjes, Nicole N. Aljoe, Robin DeRosa, Mary Getchell, and Kristina Lucenko. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2006-08-01,Janet Youngblood,"Learning Democratic Practices: Political Parties, Media and American Political Development",Hardback,9781847180254,39.99,"How does “democracy” work in the United States? How are candidates selected to appear on the ballot? How are issues framed for presentation to the electorate? What processes, conversations, institutions, and laws interact to determine how democracy “works”? How do new politicians learn to deal with all of this?There is a large and growing literature about these issues, some of which is reviewed in Chapter Two. This book examines selected facts of these issues through the lens of learning theory. It turns out that viewing political parties as “communities of practice” is a very useful organizing principle. Within this point of view, and research presented in this book is examined how “partisans” (people who got involved beyond voting and letter-writing) learn how to function within these communities of practice. While this is formally interesting from a learning theory point of view, it turns out that the by-products of this inquiry say a lot about what is happening to “democracy” in the United States and how it got that way. The core of the book is a set of interviews with partisans. This book examines the factors that operate in political parties as communities of practice to maintain or discourage partisanship. The theories of adult learning involved in this research are from the field of learning from experience. Political socialization is the process by which the individual develops a politicalidentity. In a large research study in Europe, the political socialization processfor adults to learn active citizenship there was studied. This study is a partialreplica of this European study, by John Holford and Ruud van der Veen, et al.[Lifelong Learning, Governance and Active Citizenship in Europe (2003). FinalReport of the ETGACE Research Project: Education and Training for Governance and Active Citizenship in Europe: Analysis of Adult Learning and Design of Formal, Non-Formal and Informal Educational Intervention Strategies.Guildford: University of Surrey Department of Educational Studies.] In thework presented here, the activist in a political party is referred to as a “partisan”.For purposes of this research, “partisans” are those who have joined a politicalparty by taking part in membership activities, or as candidates. ","""Janet Youngblood summarizes in the opening chapters of her book serious deficits of late modern American democracy, such as the increasing role of the mass media, and the famous Supreme Court decision that “money is speech”. Her own in-depth interviews with party members discloses how all this has ruined the internal party democracy. American political parties nowadays are run as corporations, industries. The bewildering consequence is that such political parties discourage political participation, instead of what is their true mission, to stimulate participation. Janet Youngblood makes clear that this trend must and can be reversed."" Ruud van der Veen, Teachers College Columbia University ""Janet Youngblood makes an important contribution to our understanding of the process by which citizens become partisans. Her unique perspective comes from viewing the process of democracy through the lens of learning theory, and in analyzing political parties and the actors inside of those organizations as communities of practice. Youngblood’s book will be of relevance to practitioners as well as scholars in education, political science, and public policy, and I recommend it most highly."" Jane Junn, Rutgers University ""This study is a very important documentation of severe problems in the US democratic system. To analyse the political parties as communities of practice, and to make use of theories of political socialization and adult learning to do so, has proved to be a very productive approach. The author’s in-depth investigation reveals highly reprehensible features of the real political conditions of a nation which wants to be the democratic role model of others."" Knud Illeris, Professor of Lifelong Learning, Danish University of Education ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2006-10-01,Jon Lewis,Tomorrow through the Past: Neal Stephenson and the Project of Global Modernization,Hardback,9781847180612,39.99,"Tomorrow Through the Past: Neal Stephenson and the Project of Global Modernization is the first collection of scholarly essays dedicated exclusively to this important voice in contemporary American fiction. The collection grew from five essays originally presented at the 2006 XXth Century Literature Conference at the University of Louisville, and the contributors are made up of graduate students, independent scholars, and university professors who hope the collection will aid general readers as well as instructors teaching Stephenson and professionals building the critical response to his work. Reading through the lenses of history and linguistic, cultural, and science fiction studies, the essays in the collection examine each of Stephenson’s novels from The Big U to The Baroque Cycle as well as his long non-fiction work on computer operating systems, In the Beginning … Was the Command Line. Included in this collection is a new interview conducted with Stephenson during the summer of 2006. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2006-12-01,Robert Sheardy Jr.,Searching for America: Essays on Art and Architecture,Hardback,9781847180810,34.99,"The fourteen essays in this collection were drawn from papers presented at the annual conference of the American Culture Association in April of 2006. The widely ranging topics and diverse points of view are typical of papers showcased by this organization of educators, writers, cultural critics and graduate students. These essays each consider the pedagogical parameters by which the art of the United States is defined and, as we are a nation of many voices, they further represent the multicultural identities of America and its citizens. From traditional art historical analysis to post-modernist deconstruction, the authors represented herein explore paintings, prints, sculpture, and architectural objects, in the context of history, philosophy, aesthetics, and political points of view. The writers themselves represent multidisciplinary viewpoints, from art history to literature to architecture and social work. Their papers reflect current scholarship, speaking from the most up to date of pedagogies, and in voices which are both critical and analytical. They further speak for the American Culture Association whose mission it is to explore ""all manifestations of the cultures of the Americas."" ","""This unconventional and highly stimulating anthology on historical and contemporary topics in American art and architecture presents a series of polemical, provocative, and refreshing essays by a lineup of authors ranging from emerging scholars to established academics, social activists, artists, and architects. The range of topics is equally diverse, extending from nineteenth-century print culture to contemporary urban space, but all of the essays address crucial issues of American identity, as filtered through the works of individual artists, stamped upon the metropolitan landscape, or refracted through searing images of terror and trauma. Erudite yet at the same time engagingly readable, these lively and thought-provoking pieces seek ""America"" in places both familiar and strange, while illuminating art's vital, if often troubling, presence in American spaces past and present."" —Sarah Burns, Professor of Art History, Indiana University, Author of Painting the Darks Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth Century America ""In his search for essays on American art, editor Robert Sheardy, Jr has produced a collection that, like the field of American art history itself, contains a variety of approaches, here taken up by an equally diverse group of scholars drawn from the ranks of art and architectural historians, artists, architects, literary scholars, curators, journalists, and political activists, who hail from the U.S., Panama, Iran, and Japan. Some exploit the insights of philosophy and literary theory, bringing together Georges Bataille and Ana Mendieta, Omar Khayyám and Elihu Vedder, and Don DeLillo and Andy Warhol. Others ground their investigations in the social history of art, revealing the visual narratives of social activism in Chicago, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and New Orleans. Still others look to urban studies, visual studies, feminist studies, and critical race theory, tracing scars in the urban landscape, the artistic influence of mid-19th century women’s magazines and mid-20th century art magazines, and the boundaries of whiteness in early 20th century portraiture. Written by both seasoned veterans and newcomers to the field, these essays add yet further information to our discussions of well-known American artists and architects—Elihu Vedder, Robert Henri, George Luks, Christo, Louis Kahn—while also introducing us to lesser known figures—Morris Topchevsky—and providing us a window on the rapidly evolving and expanding field of American art history."" —Frances K. Pohl, Professor of Art History, Pomona College, Author of Framing America: A Social History of American Art ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-02-01,Jacek Gutorow and Tomasz Lebiecki,Conformity and Resistance in America,Hardback,9781847181138,44.99,"Conformity and Resistance in America, a collection of thirty six essays from various fields of the U.S. studies, addresses the American culture as a space of fruitful tensions between the generally acknowledged canons and the projects that have questioned and subverted its very foundations and archives. The book seeks to give justice to those areas of American culture that traditionally used to be treated as marginal and negligible but which in fact have added up to its uniqueness. This includes various areas of American cultural and literary studies, gender and minority studies, themes of diasporic communities, multi-ethnic and multicultural society, problems of global economy and of competing worldwide ideologies. The papers included in this book try to answer pressing questions of the American identity in the post-9/11 world, and do so by pointing to the recent “humanities crisis” as well as revealing moments of heterogeneity and discontinuity in the making of any culture. Contrary to Samuel Huntington’s dictum telling us of the inevitable “clash of civilizations,” the following essays concentrate on what Edward W. Said called “humanism’s sphere” – the sphere of antagonizing discourses and narratives which challenge rather than confirm the bases of their legitimacy. Wavering between conformity and resistance, the essays propose possible formulas for the new American identity as it strives to define and project itself into the new century. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-03-01,Ricardo Miguez,American Dreams: Dialogues in U.S. Studies,Hardback,9781847180827,39.99,"The scholars included in this collection sought to indicate more contemporary working definitions for the expression ""American Dream"", or rather Dreams. The multidisciplinary selections come from many countries and represent scholars from different backgrounds. They reflect the current developments and approaches in the field of US Studies and we hope to help broaden the scope of programs in higher education institutions. The chapters are thematically organized in two sections: “Initial Dialogues” and “Comparative Dialogues.” The first one comprises essays that set the foundations for our discussions and intends to familiarize newcomers with the theme. The second section extends the possibilities of working comparatively with the American Dreams and a number of other interdisciplinary fields of interest for US Studies programs. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-05-01,"Catherine Armstrong, Roger Fagge and Tim Lockley",America in the British Imagination,Hardback,9781847181695,34.99,"No other region of the world has exerted such a fascination for the British, and for such a long time, as the United States of America. From the first explorations and settlements in the seventeenth century, through the heyday of the first British empire in the Americas in the eighteenth century and the fundamental re-conceptualisation of America following independence, to the present day American global hegemony a vast variety of Britons have looked across the Atlantic and pondered on American life, culture, politics and attitudes. In this volume a number of scholars from a variety of different disciplines (History, English, Theatre Studies, Music and History of Art) explore the ways in which Britons have imagined America. They show how some visited America themselves, while others relied on second-hand reports, but all engaged with America on various levels, often imagining and re-imagining it through different time-periods. The ‘reality’ of American life, or of American politics was one issue, as were other factors including American identity, culture, music and theatre, all of which were filtered through a shifting gaze ranging from admiration to outright hostility Included are essays on the printed representations of early Virginia, the view of British consuls living in the slave South, the interpretations of diverse writers such as Dickens, Auden, Orwell and Amis, and on the lyrics and other public pronouncements of the band Radiohead. The time frame runs from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, and should enable the reader the see how British perceptions and understandings of America have evolved over those 400 years. Ultimately, the complexity and ambiguity of British imaginings of America emerges as the central theme of the book. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-05-01,Matthew Caleb Flamm and Krzysztof Piotr Skowroñski,Under Any Sky: Contemporary Readings of George Santayana,Hardback,9781847181664,34.99,"Under Any Sky: Contemporary Readings of George Santayana is a testament to the cross-cultural relevance of the work of one of the leading intellectuals of the twentieth century, George Santayana (1863-1952, birth name Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana). A list of geographic origins of the twenty-two contributions contained in this volume indicates the transatlantic cultural diversity of scholarly representation: scholars variously hailing from Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, Slovakia, and Switzerland, and from the United States, representing three of its major regions. The authors explore the major plots of Santayana's thinking, including materialistic Platonism in ontology, skepticism in epistemology, rationality in social philosophy, naturalism in aesthetics, piety in materialism, and literary and poetic expression as a means to cosmic understanding. After a preface by Professor John Lachs (also a contributor), and an editorial introduction, the book is divided into three respective thematic parts: I. Ontology and Naturalism; II. Culture, Society, America; and III. Aesthetics, Poetry, and Spirit. Before each thematic section brief introductions of the section papers is provided to accommodate specific scholarly interests. The authors entrust the present volume to readers appreciative of the philosophic catholicity of the subject's work, invoking the book title which is taken from the preface of Santayana's mature system of philosophy, Scepticism and Animal Faith: ""In the past or in the future, my language and my borrowed knowledge would have been different, but under whatever sky I had been born, since it is the same sky, I should have had the same philosophy"" ","“Santayana's ‘holistic interpretative approach’ is alive in this collection of essays from an international group of scholars. This book makes a convincing case for the cross-cultural relevance of George Santayana as philosopher, poet, and critic. The scholarship is of the highest standard, and the contributors represent a rich variety of cultural perspectives. The thoughtful editing appreciates the breadth and depth of both the thinker and the present contributions. The essays take up Santayana's philosophic vision from their variety of cultural and intellectual perspectives and suggest important possibilities for humane intellectual life in the 21st century.” -Professor Marianne S. Wokeck, Santayana Edition, Director and Editor; Kristine W. Frost, Santayana Edition, Assistant Director and Associate Editor; Dr. Martin Coleman, Santayana Edition, Associate Editor; Professor Paul Nagy, Santayana Edition, Consulting Editor. “Among philosophers of our own time, George Santayana enjoyed the rarest of distinctions in being immortalized in Wallace Stevens' long poem ‘To an Old Philosopher in Rome.’ The present volume, justly international in scope and exhibiting the breadth, depth, and pace of progress in the burgeoning field of Santayana Studies, marks the most contemporary tribute to the philosopher whose ‘life in the spirit’ ranged across continents and centuries.” -Professor David Dilworth, State University of New York at Stony Brook ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-08-01,Joseph Mills,A Century of the Marx Brothers,Hardback,9781847182401,34.99,"In 1905 Julius Marx began his vaudeville career with the singing group The Leroy Trio and was abandoned in the middle of the tour. It was an inauspicious start for the person who would become ""Groucho."" A hundred years later, the Marx Brothers have permeated our culture from the plastic noses and glasses worn at parties to a Smithsonian exhibition which explains DNA recombination using A Night at the Opera. Although they completed relatively few films together, the brothers have become icons, recognizable even to people who have never seen their movies. Most scholarly work on the Marx Brothers has focused on biographical aspects of their careers and lives; A Century of the Marx Brothers suggests a myriad of other useful approaches to their film and stage productions. The collection's eleven essays examine the Marx Brothers' work from a number of critical perspectives ranging from reader-response theory to film semiotics. The contributors include international scholars in a variety of fields, such as literature, cultural studies, performance studies, and film history. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-08-01,Bert Cardullo,American Drama/Critics: Writings and Readings,Hardback,9781847182517,39.99,"""American Drama/Critics: Writings and Readings"" is a collection of essays on acknowledged classics of American drama such as ""Death of a Salesman,"" ""The Glass Menagerie,"" and ""Our Town,"" and on newer but no less esteemed works like David Mamet's ""Glengarry Glen Ross"" and Sam Shepard's ""Buried Child."" Included are interviews with the great American drama critics Eric Bentley and Stanley Kauffmann; a consideration of the practice of American dramaturgy; an analysis of the adaptation to film of several American dramas; and an examination of experimental playwriting and production in the United States, as seen in the work of Gertrude Stein as well as that of other, lesser-known avant-garde dramatists. This book's thesis is not only the generally accepted one that American drama is essentially a representational one and that its avant-garde experiments are just that--experimental detours that ultimate lead back to the main highway of realism and naturalism. The thesis of ""Americam Drama/Critics"" is also that the decline of American drama in the late twentieth to early twenty-first century is paralleled by, and even attributable to, the decline or disappearance of American dramatic criticism. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-09-01,William S. Waddell,"""Catch if you can your country’s moment"": Recovery and Regeneration in the Poetry of Adrienne Rich",Hardback,9781847182715,29.99,"The eight essays in this collection explore the work of Adrienne Rich, one of America’s most significant living writers and a poet and a public intellectual with a substantial audience both inside and outside the academy. Taken together, the essays argue for a shift in the perceived center of gravity of Rich’s career, from the passionate and eloquent poems of a largely personal feminist awakening, from the mid 60s to the early 80s, to the equally (if differently) passionate and eloquent poems of a more broadly public re-imagination of our country and its history, beginning with her work of the mid 1980s. Rich has remained committed to the reconstruction of poetry’s place in public as well as private life, nationally and globally. From varied perspectives, accessible to the common reader as well as the specialist, the collection addresses Rich’s negotiation of the boundary between these public and private spheres and the potential of poetry as a revolutionary medium and alternate epistemology, a means, as the title expresses it, of recovery and regeneration. Rich has aimed always, as the last lines of her poem “Planetarium” (1968) have it, at “the relief of the body / and the reconstruction of the mind,” and this collection works to describe her effort to extend the reach of that healing motive across a continent and a culture. ""In these eight keenly executed essays edited by William Waddell, we see Rich finally removing those “asbestos gloves” once used to handle sizzling political topics. Critics in this volume show Adrienne Rich struggling barehanded with changing poetic strategies, complex new subject positions and the relations of power and cultural practice in the constitution of history. Transformative cartographer of words and perceptions, Rich, as Waddell argues, outlines “a method for redefining American space,” remapping North American culture for the marginalized, the repressed and the resistant. Waddell’s collection celebrates the polyphony of politics and aesthetics in Rich’s work, shaping for the reader an ethical discourse intensively visible, for the first time, in volumes such as An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991, but equally present throughout Rich’s prose and poetry."" Mary Lynn Broe, Caroline Werner Gannett Professor, Rochester Institute of Technology ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-09-01,"Claudia Slate, General Editor, Florida Southern College and Steve Glassman, Executive",Florida Studies: Proceedings of the 2006 Annual Meeting of the Florida College English Association,Hardback,9781847182654,39.99,"Florida was the first region of the United States to be discovered, explored, and, after a fashion, settled by Euroamericans. Its population in the early 21st century is approaching 17 million. Within years the number of people living in the state will surpass those living in New York, and the Sunshine State will become the most populous area east of the Mississippi. The first book in English about Florida was written by Jean Ribault. A French adventurer, Ribault established a colony of Huguenots near present-day Jacksonville. He was captured by the very able Spanish commander Pedro Menendez, who ordered his French rival and all his minions killed. The state’s long and colorful past is matched by its equally long and colorful literary production. Strangely, critical assessment of Florida literature has lagged far behind. With this volume, the Florida College English Association has formally begun an effort to correct this lamentable oversight. Included are papers on every aspect of Florida literature and history by scholars from every part of the state who are employed in every kind of institution of higher learning. Of special interest are the studies of Florida literature in the 19th century and in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, areas that are generally ignored in national journals. The papers on the contributions of African-American literary figures, such as Zora Hurston and James Weldon Johnson, are noteworthy. Of particular interest are the suggestions for teaching Florida studies in the classroom, which can be adapted for high school as well as college students. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-09-01,Earl Yarington and Mary De Jong,Popular Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and the Literary Marketplace,Hardback,9781847182326,44.99,"""Wide-ranging, admirably researched, and accessible, this volume of essays locates women writers firmly in the center of the hurly-burly of literary and economic developments that made up the literary marketplace in nineteenth-century America."" —Dr. Joanne Dobson, independent scholar and novelist. ""This remarkable collection by editors Earl Yarington and Mary De Jong contributes richly to the ongoing recovery of the works and methods of highly popular American women writers of the nineteenth century. Augmenting the body of scholarship on professional women writers, these essays showcase the ways in which best-selling female authors met the demands of a burgeoning literary marketplace. This collection provides striking insights into an industry that was anything but sedate or genteel. Sensitive to hair-trigger shifts in the marketplace, nineteenth-century women writers refined their strategies for meeting consumer desires. Professional writers like Stowe, Hale, Warner, Holmes and Southworth are recognized here for their attunement to audience trends, tastes and temperament. They responded with a prodigious output of novels, short fiction, non-fiction and serialized features that bolstered the American publishing industry. The contributors to this much-needed volume have succeeded in re-acquainting later generations with the extensive output and skilled professionalism of writers whose works once covered parlor library tables. This is an important scholarly achievement."" —Susan I. Gatti, Indiana University of PA Includes essays on Lydia Maria Child, Elizabeth Oakes Smith,Grace Greenwood, Anna Warner, E. D. E. N. Southworth, Alcott, Grace King, Frances Harper, Chopin, Winnifred Eaton, and other successful authors. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-10-01,Priscilla Roberts,Bridging the Sino-American Divide: American Studies with Chinese Characteristics,Hardback,9781847183170,44.99,"Within China, the discipline of American Studies spans a wide variety of concerns and preoccupations, reflecting its practical diversity in a transnational setting. Essays in this volume by close to forty scholars, the majority most of them based in mainland China, reflect on the past history and current teaching of American Studies within China, placing these in comparative perspectives. The nature of globalization, the transmission of ideas and practices across cultural boundaries, the formulation and meaning of identity in cross-national communications, constitute major themes in contemporary American Studies in China. For officials and commentators alike, the past, present, and future state of Sino-American relations are also an overriding preoccupation of China’s America-watchers. Overall, this collection allows the reader to sample and appreciate the state of the field of American Studies in today’s China. ","""Bridging the Sino-American Divide is a welcome contribution to transnational American Studies. New scholarship in the book explores popular culture, feminism, literature, history, politics, diplomacy, foreign relations, trade, consumer culture, immigration, tourism, national values, globalization and other topics in comparative perspective. The rich smorgasbord of essays also surveys the development of American Studies in China, and provides institutional histories and pedagogical models, paying particular attention to cultural differences, and to the challenges facing Chinese Americanists in the 21st century. The result is a fascinating volume that will be of interest to scholars in a broad range of fields."" Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Stanford University, Past-President of the American Studies Association ""This essential and unique volume--by gathering a group of top scholars and leading practitioners from China and the United States--reviews critically the status of American Studies in China, highlights the political, social and cultural forces shaping Chinese perceptions of America, and examines the opportunities and challenges facing US-China relations. By putting together this important book, Priscilla Roberts has made a major contribution--one that is with no parallel in the existing scholarship--to the fields of American Studies and US-China relations. It is highly revealing, and highly recommended."" —Chen Jian, Michael J. Zak Professor of History for US-China Relations, Cornell University ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-10-01,Joyce C. Harte,Come Weep With Me: Loss and Mourning in the Writings of Caribbean Women Writers,Hardback,9781847183248,39.99,"This groundbreaking anthology represents the critical inquiry of literary scholars into the trope of loss and mourning in the work of women writers from the Caribbean archipelago. There is a great deal of recent scholarly interest in the relationship of loss and mourning yet there are no books specifically devoted to an examination of this trope in the works of Caribbean women writers. To fill this gap, this collection of original essays examines subjects that encompass the brutality of slavery, oppressive dictatorships, AIDS, and the catastrophe of the Mount Pele volcano that appear in the writings of women from the English, Spanish and French speaking Caribbean. It is an important addition to the contemporary discourse on loss and mourning. The project is an exciting and vital one because it brings together a multiplicity of perspectives and critical approaches to examine the works of writers such as Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, Julia Alvarez and Maryse Condé. What emerges is a complex portrait of loss, mourning and remembrance that both enriches and challenges customary discourses of loss, mourning and melancholia. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-10-01,Gary Grieve-Carlson,Olson’s Prose,Hardback,9781847182906,34.99,"Author of The Maximus Poems, Rector of Black Mountain College, and quondam Democratic Party activist, Charles Olson is one of the central figures of mid-twentieth-century American poetry. Charles Olson: A Poet’s Prose is the first book-length critical study to focus strictly on Olson’s prose, ranging from his groundbreaking study of Melville, Call Me Ishmael (1947), through such seminal work as “Projective Verse” (1950), “Human Universe” (1951), The Special View of History (1956, 1970), “Equal, That Is, to the Real Itself” (1958), and Proprioception (1962). The eleven essays collected in this volume introduce a new generation of scholars who engage Olson’s thinking on gender and sexuality, human ecology, the relevance of non-Euclidean geometry and quantum physics for poetics, phenomenology and Whitehead’s process philosophy, and postmodernism. Olson thinks and writes against the grain of the established authorities in poetry and literary criticism, and his influence on American letters has been broad and varied. Like some Old Testament prophet or Melville’s Ishmael, Olson projects a voice that is immediately distinctive, sometimes disturbing, always provocative, and often compelling. To begin to understand postmodern American poetry, one must begin with Charles Olson. ","“Charles Olson is part of that knotty, unpredictable and enduring “American grain” growing out of Melville and Whitman—idealist and materialist at once; wildly imaginative yet profoundly rooted in place. With this volume, Gary Grieve-Carlson has collected eleven essays that add significantly to our understanding of this quintessentially American writer. Focusing on Olson’s rich and wide-ranging prose, these essays probe the various ways in which Olson explored the boundless encounter of language with experience. “ Bonnie Costello, Boston University “For anyone reading Charles Olson, sustained attention to the prose along with the poetry is essential. Grieve-Carlson’s collection offers a wide-ranging and systematic review of that prose certain to be helpful to our understanding of Olson’s significance. This timely collection takes its place in the continuing critical revaluation that is beginning to displace the confessional lyric from its central position in the poetry of the second half of the twentieth century, and establishes Olson as one of the mid-century’s most complex, difficult, provocative, and influential literary explorers.” William Waddell, St. John Fisher College ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-11-01,Daniel Scroop,Consuming Visions: New Essays on the Politics of Consumption in Modern America,Hardback,9781847183385,29.99,"The United States is the quintessential consumer society. This collection of essays brings together a new set of American and European voices from across the disciplinary spectrum of the humanities and social sciences to explore in innovative and challenging ways the “consuming visions” that have informed American political, social, and cultural life in the twentieth century. Ranging in subject matter from the anti-chain store movement that swept across small-town America in the 1920s and 1930s to the “bling” aesthetic in contemporary African American film, these essays explore how questions of consumption have been imagined, understood, and contested. While the collection coheres around the contributors’ common concern with how consumption has been—and is—political, its distinctiveness lies in the broad sweep of its disciplinary range. Furthermore, Consuming Visions illuminates a wide range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the politics of consumption, with contributions from legal, social and political historians, and scholars from media and communications studies. Providing fresh perspectives on one the most dynamic sub-fields in American Studies, Consuming Visions will appeal to students and academics with an interest in consumerism and consumption in the twentieth-century United States. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-11-01,Danielle A. Hidalgo and Kristen Barber,Narrating the Storm: Sociological Stories of Hurricane Katrina,Hardback,9781847183620,34.99,"For those interested in learning more about the personal impact of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, Narrating the Storm serves as an essential read. This important and timeless volume is a compilation of sixteen narratives that address the experiences of Gulf Coast residents, faculty, and graduate students who were caught up in the largest (not so) natural disaster in United States history. Each contributor deploys storytelling sociology as a methodological approach in order to illustrate how “personal” experiences with disaster are not so personal, but rather reflect and are informed by larger social phenomena related to issues including race, class, gender, age, bureaucracy, risk, collective memory, the blasé, and more. The narratives in this volume exemplify how inequality and injustice are unveiled, exacerbated, and created by the occurrence of disaster; and reveal the sociological in everyday and not-so-everyday experiences. ","“Before we are done with it, hundreds of books and thousands of articles will be written about that set of events we have come to call Katrina. But none of them will be anything like this remarkable collection of memoirs. The authors gathered here all know how to spin a tale and how to do so with a rich sociological sensibility. But, far more to the point, they all have gripping stories to tell.” – Kai Erikson, author of A New Species of Trouble: The Human Experience of Modern Disasters “. . . Narrating the Storm is must reading for anyone interested in the Hurricane Katrina disaster and its aftermath. Emotionally evocative, riveting at times, this engaging collection of original essays is replete with sociological insight. The book is an important contribution, as well, to the genre of storytelling sociology.” – Ronald J. Berger, author of Storytelling Sociology: Narrative as Social Inquiry “The stories told by these individuals provide compelling applications and examples of sociological concepts and theories that serve to stimulate our sociological imaginations. Narrating the Storm is an important contribution to society’s efforts to better understand this latest American tragedy unleashed by Katrina.” – Duane A. Gill, editor of Voices of Katrina, the Journal of Public Management and Social Policy “The authors . . . give us thoughtful, personal, often emotional narratives as well as clear analytical insight on a wide range of issues . . . Narrating the Storm humanizes the disaster with its honest stories and aptly uses theoretical tools to place the stories in a larger sociological context. This is a unique and engaging book.” – Alice Fothergill, author of Heads Above Water: Gender, Class, and Family in the Grand Forks Flood ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-12-01,"T.Foy Vernon, with Mícheál Ó'hAodha, editor",American “Outsider”: Stories from the Irish Traveller Diaspora,Hardback,9781847183927,34.99,"Of all of the world’s countries, America is the one that we all think we know. World globalization and the dominance of English language and American idiom makes us secure in our “knowledge” of what the United States is and who her people are. This book jettisons all such pre-conceptions. It affords a window on the American experience that eschews many of the hackneyed representations of old. It throws back the curtains on the hidden lives of a people who quietly live along the dusty weave of a Mid-West highway. Small towns, woods and wayside stops. Like passengers in the rear of the truck, we are brought on a journey of “life as it is lived” for the quintessential “people of the road”―the Irish―American Pavees (Travellers). This book is a small glimpse of a distinct culture, language and a way of life. As bravely-written as it is unique, this is the story of a people who have lived in the shadows of rumour, hearsay and a hot summer sun. Strange, yet familiar. These are the shy migrants of the nameless road. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-12-01,Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin,Beyond Words: The Othering Excursion in Contemporary American Literature,Hardback,9781847183705,34.99,"This is a book about reading, or rather about the moment when the usual frames of interpretation no longer apply. That is where the Othering Excursion begins. Through disruptive forms of rhetoric, writers discard the structures and norms of the cultural system and use the disorders thus created to suggest what lies beyond it. Cultivating distortion, conceptual blocks and chaotic constructions, their texts flout normal processes of interpretation. Whereas traditional approaches often overlook these disorders or treat them as a form of informational noise, in this study they become the basis of critical reflection. Harding and Martin elaborate a critical concept and a range of reading methods to deal with what seem to be zones of obscurity in literary texts. Cutting across boundaries of race, ethnicity and gender, they treat a wide range of poetry and short fiction that challenges traditional interpretations. Giving new readings of canonical texts, the book examines works by American authors that are widely read and taught, like Elizabeth Bishop, A.R. Ammons, Don DeLillo, Leslie Marmon Silko, or Sandra Cisneros. At the same time, it includes studies of emerging writers like Kate Braverman, Dan Chaon, or Chase Twichell. ""There is something deeply moving in witnessing the birth of a new concept. And indeed Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin’s concept of “Othering” is a welcome addition to an already crowded field, where concepts like “difference”, “alterity” or “hybridity” are firmly established. But the new concept is more than an addition, it is more in the nature of a substitution, as it aims to replace the now exhausted concepts, allows the authors to avoid the trivialities of a criticism based on gender and race, and, by focusing on form and language (or style), to recapture the now largely lost intuitions of close reading. This combination of close reading and a firm grasp of theory is one of the attractions of the book. I am impressed by their mastery of the intricacies of theory and the range of their literary corpus (in terms both of genres and texts). I have no doubt that their book will be a major contribution to the renewal of the study of contemporary American literature."" —Professor Jean-Jacques Lecercle, University of Nanterre, Paris In Beyond Words, Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin offer “a new attitude to reading” that approaches true diversity by ignoring trends toward traditional groupings of authors by race and gender and instead examining, democratically, recent American literature in terms of its unique and peculiar achievements. In choosing texts that employ “the rhetoric of the inexpressible,” the authors have identified “Othering” as the common thread running through short fiction and poetry by authors as varied as Allen Ginsberg, Raymond Carver, Sandra Cisneros, Adrienne Rich, and Li-Young Lee. In transliterating the language of the ineffable and unspoken, Beyond Words employs its superbly original methodology toward unfolding previously inaccessible layers of meaning and provoking a fuller understanding of the creative process and its cultural milieu. —Michael Waters, Professor of English at Salisbury University, USA ""A germinal study from an ""other"" (in this case, European) perspective of an at once idiosyncratic and indicative range of American texts with a view of how they, themselves, encounter the unexamined and unexpected."" —Marilyn Hacker, Professor at City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center ""Invigorating and original, Beyond Words: The Othering Excursion in Contemporary American Literature challenges conventional ways of approaching literary texts. Eschewing binaries, Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin propose a new approach to reading and analyzing the heterogeneity of recent American literature. By juxtaposing both well-known and less-familiar poetry and short fiction by authors as various as Gayl Jones, John Ashbery, Russell Banks, and Marilyn Nelson, Harding and Martin consider a stimulating variety of texts that cross aesthetic, generic, canonical and political boundaries. Harding and Martin’s polysemous approach to literary texts, a procedure they call “othering,” is groundbreaking and enlightening. Beyond Words provides rich insights for scholars and general readers alike. Harding and Martin’s new mapping of American literature is a remarkable achievement, certain to provoke dialogue for decades to come."" —Sue Standing, Jane Ruby Professor of English, Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts ""In this new book with the apt title Beyond Words: the Othering Excursion in Contemporary American Literature, Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin promise to generate intense conversation about their conceptual approach to reading canonical, as well as newer texts in late twentieth century American literature. Beyond Words favors a shift in thinking about all texts that defy conventional analysis, and it resists the cleavages that it finds in unsatisfactory terms like “alterity” and “hybridity” conceived to account for differences in gender-racial, ethnic, and class contexts. Re-conceiving Othering as a corroborative and complementary methodology rather than a splintered one, Beyond Words invites an illuminating, comprehensive analysis of literary production in late twentieth century American texts."" —Helena Woodard, Associate Professor of English, Department of English, University of Texas at Austin, USA ","""Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin offer [this work] as a breath of fresh air not only for the study of American poetry and prose of the last thirty years, but as an attempt to revitalize literary criticism generally...It is a difficult task that could easily descend into a repetition of broad poststructuralist premises or overly generalized arguments, but Harding and Martin take such care with the project's organization and the reiteration and refining of their claim that the result is a valuable contribution on several levels...The strength of 'Beyond Words' is that it does not seek to offer a strict critical framework to be further applied to the authors and other works. The limitations of that kind of methodology are precisely what the critics argue against. Instead, they advocate an openness of reading, a way of making ourselves more and variously available to all the text has to offer."" Stacey Peebles, University of North Carolina at Greensboro ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-01-01,Laura Hapke,Labor’s Canvas: American Working-Class History and the WPA Art of the 1930s,Hardback,9781847184153,34.99,"At an unprecedented and probably unique American moment, laboring people were indivisible from the art of the 1930s. By far the most recognizable New Deal art employed an endless frieze of white or racially ambiguous machine proletarians, from solo drillers to identical assembly line toilers. Even today such paintings, particularly those with work themes, are almost instantly recognizable. Happening on a Depression-era picture, one can see from a distance the often simplified figures, the intense or bold colors, the frozen motion or flattened perspective, and the uniformity of laboring bodies within an often naive realism or naturalism of treatment. In a kind of Social Realist dance, the FAP’s imagined drillers, haulers, construction workers, welders, miners, and steel mill workers make up a rugged industrial army. In an unusual synthesis of art and working-class history, Labor’s Canvas argues that however simplified this golden age of American worker art appears from a post-modern perspective, The New Deal’s Federal Art Project (FAP), under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), revealed important tensions. Artists saw themselves as cultural workers who had much in common with the blue-collar workforce. Yet they struggled to reconcile social protest and aesthetic distance. Their canvases, prints, and drawings registered attitudes toward laborers as bodies without minds often shared by the wider culture. In choosing a visual language to reconnect workers to the larger society, they tried to tell the worker from the work with varying success. Drawing on a wealth of social documents and visual narratives, Labor’s Canvas engages in a bold revisionism. Hapke examines how FAP iconography both chronicles and reframes working-class history. She demonstrates how the New Deal’s artistically rendered workforce history reveals the cultural contradictions about laboring people evident even in the depths of the Great Depression, not the least in the imaginations of the FAP artists themselves. ","""Laura Hapke offers us a marvelous view of under-appreciated and unappreciated labor art in an era when labor emerged at the center of the struggle for democracy in America. Hapke's deft eye, her meticulous research, her fine writing all work together to provide the reader an understanding of art history as well as social history. The illustrations in this book, carefully selected, will bring the reader additional joy and insight: it will be a book to look at, enjoy and appreciate for a long time."" —Paul Buhle, Senior Lecturer, Brown University, Editor, ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE AMERICAN LEFT, also INSURGENT IMAGES, THE AGITPROP MURALS OF MIKE ALEWITZ, and other volumes. “This elaborately detailed yet analytical work does for American labor art in the twentieth century what Hapke’s previously published Labor’s Text did for imaginative literature of the working class: it contextualizes, distinguishes among approaches, and explores the contradictions and singularities among the artists as well as their sponsors and partisans. The productions of the Federal Arts Project are shown to be anything but monolithic; the relationship of the art to trade unionism and the rise of the CIO is studied in depth, as is the struggle for presence among women and racial and ethnic minorities. Hapke’s study is not only encyclopedic but constantly engrossing. In her keeping, the collective body and the individual face of the worker under representation are equally well served.” —John Crawford, publisher of West End Press (USA) ""In each of her half a dozen books, she [Hapke] engages a prismatic scholarly approach, cutting into a particular vein of history or culture and bringing its rich material to the surface. She resists theoretical fads and grounds her work in a Gramscian commitment to use her prowess as a scholar to tell the larger story of working class people in American history. The structure of Labor's Canvas provides a valuable historical chronology and narrative...it is a dense book written by an exemplary scholar for other scholars. Her notes and bibliographic sources, true for all her books, are genuine contributions to scholarly research within the confines of the book and beyond."" ---Janet Zandy (Professor of Language and Literature, Rochester Institute of Technology) in Working USA, October 2008 ""This valuable book adds further weight to the arguments that the New Deal was a phenomenon much further than the left previously believed, and that the influence and scope of the Communist Party was greater than conventional literature suggests"" Gerald Mayer, Professor of History, CUNY in American Communist History Vol. 8, No. 1, 2009 ""Labor's Canvas will be of great interest not only to scholars of American art and history, but also to artists who are committed to aligning their artistic practice with the struggles of organized labor at the beginning of the twenty-fist century."" Frances Pohl, Chair of Art and Art History, Pomona College in Journal of Working Class Studies Association, Dec. 2008 ""In addition to its excellent introduction, Hapke's book consists of seven chapters on topics about the Federal Arts Project ranging from women, African Americans, to the depiction of masses of workers - listening to speakers, marching, or purposelessly milling about. Some chapters feature reproductions of aptly chosen representative works. While all of the essays couls stand alone as publishable essays, each enriches the others; and all succeed in responding to the stated thesis of the book. Though primarily a work of art history, whichi significantly contributes to an important period in American art, Labor's Canvas also sheds a broader light. This valuable book adds further weight to the arguments that the New Deal was a phenomenon much further Left than previously believed and that the influence and scope of the Communist Party was greater than the conventional literature asserts."" Gerald Meyer in Political Affairs, 2010 ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-01-01,Christina Nielsen,To Inspire and Instruct: A History of Medieval Art in Midwestern Museums,Hardback,9781847183316,34.99,"This collection of essays, which derive from a symposium held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005, tells the story of how medieval art was collected by both individuals and institutions in the American Midwest. This book will appeal to both medievalists and scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth century American history. In addition, it will also appeal to scholars who are interested in museum studies and the history of collecting. The essays in the first section, “Collecting and Displaying Medieval Art,” consider the formation of medieval art collections at influential cultural institutions in three of the most important centers of industry and culture in the Midwest: Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland. The second section, “Medieval Art as Inspiration and Education,” examines the motives of both private donors and museum professionals in forming collections and establishing period rooms and cloistered spaces at museums in Toledo, Kansas City, and St. Louis, among others. At the opposite end of the spectrum was a new trend in curatorial practice, beginning in the 1930s, that favored the dismantling of period rooms and espoused displaying historical works of art in more distinctly modern settings, a theme that pervades section three, “Medieval Art and Modernism.” An essay on medieval art in Midwestern university art museums and another one that considers the impact of works from medieval collections in special exhibitions serve as a remarkable coda to the rest of the volume. Two appendices follow this, one that provides an overview of medieval art collections in Midwestern university museums and another which provides a biographical sketch of prominent dealers of medieval art from 1900-1950. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-01-01,Theodore Walker and Mihály Tóth,"Whiteheadian Ethics: Abstracts and Papers from the Ethics Section of the Philosophy Group at the 6th International Whitehead Conference at the University of Salzburg, July 2006",Hardback,9781847184405,29.99,"For deliberations on the ethical and meta-ethical implications of Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, here are abstracts and papers from the Ethics Section of the 6th International Whitehead Conference held at the University of Salzburg in Salzburg, Austria in July 2006. In accordance with the conference schedule, there are three subsections. The subsection on “Metaphysics of Morals and Moral Theory” includes contributions from Franklin I. Gamwell (""Does Morality Presuppose God?""), John W. Lango (abstract only), Duane Voskuil (“Ethics' Dipolar Necessities and Theistic Implications""), and Theodore Walker Jr. (“Neoclassical Cosmology and Matthew 22:36-40""). The subsection on “Evaluating Moral Practices” includes contributions from Frederick Ferré (abstract only), Seung Gap Lee (""Hope for the Earth: A Process Eschatological Eco-ethics for South Korea""), Mary Elizabeth Mullino Moore (""Compassion, Creativity, and Form: The Ethics of Institutions""), and George W. Shields (""Ruse, Altruism, and Process Philosophy""). The subsection on “Ethics and Aesthetic Values” includes contributions from Stephen T. Franklin (abstract only), Brian G. Henning (""Is There an Ethics of Creativity?""), Mihály Tóth (""Art of Life and the Ethics of Life Forming""), and Guorong Yang (""Problems and Perspectives in the Emerging of Global Society""). ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-02-01,Donna L. Potts and Amy D. Unsworth,"Region, Nature, Frontiers: Proceedings from the 11th International Region and Nation Literature Association Conference",Hardback,9781847184597,34.99,"The book is a collection of sixteen essays on issues of regional and national identities and perceptions in literature ranging from South Africa to the United States. Discussions include the American frontier, the relationship between non-fiction and place, linguistic and postcolonial boundaries. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-03-01,David E. Purcell,"Crossroads of the Southwest: Culture, Identity, and Migration in Arizona’s Safford Basin",Hardback,9781847184801,34.99,"Arizona is a land of diverse landscapes, often strikingly juxtaposed. In the upper Gila River Valley of southeastern Arizona, the basin surrounding the modern town of Safford encompasses the intersection of different environments and prehistoric cultures. The Hohokam of the Sonoran Desert, Mogollon of the San Simon Valley and mountain highlands, Anasazi of the Colorado Plateau, and Apache of the mountains and plains all lived in this region during the Ceramic period, A.D. 600-1450. Crossroads of the Southwest presents the results of new archaeological research that sets aside long-standing theoretical constraints to examine anew three central themes in Southwestern archaeological study—culture, identity, and migration. Six innovative studies by top regional scholars utilize both new data and classic studies to examine a region long overlooked by archaeologists. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-04-01,Stephanie Brown and Éva Tettenborn,"Engaging Tradition, Making It New: Essays on Teaching Recent African American Literature",Hardback,9781847185280,29.99,"Engaging Tradition, Making It New offers a rich collection of fresh scholarly and pedagogical approaches to new African American literature. Organized around the theme of transgression, the collection focuses on those writers who challenge the reading habits and expectations of students and instructors, whether by engaging themes and literary forms not usually associated with African American literature or by departing from traditional modes of approaching historical, social, or legal struggles. Each chapter offers a specific reading of a particular novel, memoir, or poetry collection, sometimes in concert with a second, related text, and suggests both a useful critical context and one or more pedagogical approaches. Engaging Tradition, Making It New points the way toward exciting new methods of teaching and researching authors in this dynamic field. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-05-01,Elizabeth Dill and Sheri Weinstein,Death Becomes Her: Cultural Narratives of Femininity and Death in Nineteenth-Century America,Hardback,9781847185617,34.99,"Dead and dying women are surely an age-old narrative trope. While associations of femininity with death have become almost prototypical in literary criticism and are familiar fodder for cultural conversations, the editors of Death Becomes Her offer us an opportunity to investigate the values that underlie such associations. But from where does our tireless investment in what constitutes a feminine death, a feminine reaction to death, and death’s courting of women emerge? These essays give voice to the idea that power and victimization are not opposites, but rather are complements in an operatic fantasy of intrigue, agency, absence and presence that pervades American writing and experience. Each chapter of Death Becomes Her offers a different lens to investigate the nature of death as surely more than just an anatomical matter: The penny press obsessively covers the death of a beautiful prostitute in 1840s Chicago; a novel of seduction becomes also a narrative of autopsy; a story of haunting allows women outlets for sexual license and the polemics of desire. Overall this volume invites readers to explore the ways in which death is portrayed as both an ornamentation of femininity and an ontological reality of it: how, put simply, “death becomes her.” Essays include analyses of women’s deathbed scenes, suicides, murders, funerals, and autopsies in literature and other nineteenth-century media. As such, the chapters in Death Becomes Her show how the authorial and readerly interest in scripting and staging women’s deaths is both intricate and abiding. They tell us that death is never, of course, simply about death, and they make relevant other issues, from linguistics to politics, as they inform the literature and lives of women from the late-eighteenth to early twentieth-century America. Taken together, the pieces in Death Becomes Her allow us greater access to the surrounding culture out of which the American woman emerges, performs, lives and dies. In doing so, they offer fresh insight into the often unsettling and highly relevant role of death in feminism. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-08-01,Claudia Slate and Keith Huneycutt,Florida Studies: Proceedings of the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Florida College English Association,Hardback,9781847186294,34.99," Included in this volume are essays on various aspects of Florida Literature and history by scholars from across the state representing every kind of institution of higher learning. Of special interest are the studies of Florida literature in the 19th Century and in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, areas that are generally underrepresented in national journals. The papers on the contributions of African- America figures, such as Zora Neale Hurston, are noteworthy. Of particular interest are the suggestions for teaching Florida Studies in the classroom, which can be adapted for high school as well as college students. "," ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-08-01,"William H. Alexander, Cassandra L. Newby-Alexander and Charles H. Ford",Voices from within the Veil: African Americans and the Experience of Democracy,Hardback,9781847186256,39.99,"""And then--the Veil. It drops as drops the night on southern seas--vast, sudden, unanswering. There is Hate behind it, and Cruelty and Tears. As one peers through its intricate, unfathomable pattern of ancient, old, old design, one sees blood and guilt and misunderstanding. And yet it hangs there, this Veil, between Then and Now, between Pale and Colored and Black and White -- between You and Me."" W.E.B. DuBois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, 1920 ""As the promoters of Jamestown 2007 began to speak of the accomplishment of greater diversity in the nation, and to market the myth of the seamless confluence of Indian, European, and African traditions in the early colony, many reflected not only about how the United States' colonial origins were based on the entrepreneurial ambitions of English settlers, the conquest and degradation of native populations, and the subsequent uprooting and enslavement of untold numbers of Africans, but also about how the more recent legacy of decades of discrimination and marginalization continue to shape our world today. Despite the assimilation, acculturation, and dehumanization that have occurred in the Americas, African Americans have continued to refashion their cultures to fit their own social needs and aesthetic preferences."" From Introduction Voices from within the Veil explores the 400-year prelude to the inclusion of African Americans in the commemoration of this nation's origins. With innovative approaches and pioneering research, these essays address both the conditions of African Americans' marginalization and some of the paths toward their empowerment: marronage, the Underground Railroad, social organization, and massive protest movements, among others. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-09-01,Seymour Leventman,American Popular Culture: Historical and Pedagogical Perspectives,Paperback,9781847187451,14.99,"American pop culture is no longer merely popular. It has penetrated to such deep-lying cultural and social structures that persons dream and fantasize in pop cultural terms. It is the new reality which increasingly measures all else in the social world. The present volume consists of original essays written expressly for the 2005 Conference of the American Pop Culture Association. They fall under three headings of the Association's lead: History of Pop Culture contains papers of a distinct historical dimension pointing out that although pop culture may become an autonomous force, it exists in a context of space and time. The Teaching of Pop Culture is critical because American pop culture has become so ubiquitous, classroom educators use it to present other unrelated materials, e.g., from history, economics, politics and sociology. Not even high culture such as Classic Literature is immune to pop culture treatment. Utilizing classic literature performs a double function of popularizing high culture while also paying hommage to it. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-09-01,Robin DeRosa,Assimilation and Subversion in Earlier American Literature,Paperback,9781847187826,14.99,"Assimilation and Subversion in Earlier American Literature is a collection of essays that explores the complex interplay between dominance and oppression. Spanning the “long” early American period, the collection considers texts written from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Native Americans, Puritan ministers and Puritan “whores,” Barbadian and transatlantic slaves: the early American figures who populate these essays are talking about power, and creating—in writing—a dynamic and complicated relationship between the mainstream and the margin. The essays in this collection offer a collective paradigm for thinking about these issues, one in which “assimilation” and “subversion” are not so much oppositional as they are closely aligned, codependent, and mutually defining. Though these essays do maintain the dialectical play between the two terms, they offer new ways to think about dialectic itself. The goal of the collection is to give readers useful models for approaching texts by nondominant subjects, models that consider the polyphonic flow of power and the possibility of simultaneous multiple, conflicting, and even oppositional effects of oppression. The collection begins by looking at complex representations of the Christianized Native American, moves through a discussion of “creolized” West Indian and “converted” African slave narratives, explores the ironic uses of sentimentality in a nineteenth-century novel about slavery, and ends with a study of female criminality and the way that it both subverted and reinscribed dominant Puritan orthodoxy. The liminal spaces where assimilation becomes subversion (and vice versa) go by many difference names in this collection: the contact zone, the transcultured, the hybrid, the syncretic, the zombie, the pardodic, the parabolic, the transgressive, the framed. Each of the contributors works to find ways to describe this space without simultaneously closing it down. It can be a significant rhetorical challenge to articulate what might ultimately be a paradox, but this collection aims not only to look at familiar texts in new ways, but also to think about the critical process in a new way. In what ways does the critic’s own explication of a text undermine and stabilize the text’s coherent meaning? This is, in many ways, a collection that investigates this methodological question even as it focuses on the nature of power and how “the oppressed” write their way into and out of their own oppression. Contributors include John J. Kucich, Ann M. Brunjes, Nicole N. Aljoe, Robin DeRosa, Mary Getchell, and Kristina Lucenko. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-09-01,Janet Youngblood,"Learning Democratic Practices: Political Parties, Media and American Political Development",Paperback,9781847187475,19.99,"How does “democracy” work in the United States? How are candidates selected to appear on the ballot? How are issues framed for presentation to the electorate? What processes, conversations, institutions, and laws interact to determine how democracy “works”? How do new politicians learn to deal with all of this?There is a large and growing literature about these issues, some of which is reviewed in Chapter Two. This book examines selected facts of these issues through the lens of learning theory. It turns out that viewing political parties as “communities of practice” is a very useful organizing principle. Within this point of view, and research presented in this book is examined how “partisans” (people who got involved beyond voting and letter-writing) learn how to function within these communities of practice. While this is formally interesting from a learning theory point of view, it turns out that the by-products of this inquiry say a lot about what is happening to “democracy” in the United States and how it got that way. The core of the book is a set of interviews with partisans. This book examines the factors that operate in political parties as communities of practice to maintain or discourage partisanship. The theories of adult learning involved in this research are from the field of learning from experience. Political socialization is the process by which the individual develops a politicalidentity. In a large research study in Europe, the political socialization processfor adults to learn active citizenship there was studied. This study is a partialreplica of this European study, by John Holford and Ruud van der Veen, et al.[Lifelong Learning, Governance and Active Citizenship in Europe (2003). FinalReport of the ETGACE Research Project: Education and Training for Governance and Active Citizenship in Europe: Analysis of Adult Learning and Design of Formal, Non-Formal and Informal Educational Intervention Strategies.Guildford: University of Surrey Department of Educational Studies.] In thework presented here, the activist in a political party is referred to as a “partisan”. For purposes of this research, “partisans” are those who have joined a politicalparty by taking part in membership activities, or as candidates. ","""Janet Youngblood summarizes in the opening chapters of her book serious deficits of late modern American democracy, such as the increasing role of the mass media, and the famous Supreme Court decision that “money is speech”. Her own in-depth interviews with party members discloses how all this has ruined the internal party democracy. American political parties nowadays are run as corporations, industries. The bewildering consequence is that such political parties discourage political participation, instead of what is their true mission, to stimulate participation. Janet Youngblood makes clear that this trend must and can be reversed."" Ruud van der Veen, Teachers College Columbia University ""Janet Youngblood makes an important contribution to our understanding of the process by which citizens become partisans. Her unique perspective comes from viewing the process of democracy through the lens of learning theory, and in analyzing political parties and the actors inside of those organizations as communities of practice. Youngblood’s book will be of relevance to practitioners as well as scholars in education, political science, and public policy, and I recommend it most highly."" Jane Junn, Rutgers University ""This study is a very important documentation of severe problems in the US democratic system. To analyse the political parties as communities of practice, and to make use of theories of political socialization and adult learning to do so, has proved to be a very productive approach. The author’s in-depth investigation reveals highly reprehensible features of the real political conditions of a nation which wants to be the democratic role model of others."" Knud Illeris, Professor of Lifelong Learning, Danish University of Education ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-09-01,Elizabeth Boyle and Anne-Marie Evans,Reading America: New Perspectives on the American Novel,Hardback,9781847187772,34.99,"This specially commissioned volume of essays offers a refreshing and unusual perspective on classic novels from the American literary canon. Accessible to students, scholars and the interested reader, this engaging collection explores familiar novels through unfamiliar lenses and, in so doing, sheds light on surprising and previously overlooked aspects of each text. Reading America presents a new approach to American literature by showcasing a cross-section of recent research into previously un-tapped areas of interest. Each chapter attempts to re-read classic American texts using new or unorthodox theoretical frameworks, including such diverse topics as an Emersonian reading of Don DeLillo, decoding Thomas Pynchon with eco-criticism and understanding Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy by exploring the graphic novel version of “City of Glass”. Other authors explored in this way include Henry James, Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates and F. Scott Fitzgerald. This type of approach widens the reader’s knowledge of each well-known text and encourages new critical evaluations of contemporary American literature. The collection moves through six large topic areas, from Naturalism and an idea of the “Great American Novel” at the end of the nineteenth century, through politics, sexuality, language and nature, to a contemporary engagement with postmodernism. Each essay deals with its own particular subject and author, but the full impact of each on the notion of the “American novel” as a phenomenon can only be understood when read in conjunction with the others. Of interest to both undergraduate and postgraduate students, Reading America would be a valuable asset to any American Studies or American Literature degree course, and a useful companion to American History or Politics courses. The volume will also attract strong interest from established academics, especially those researching the fields of literature, critical theory, cultural history and politics. ","""'Reading America' does what it promises, offering new perspectives on the American novel. The articles are fresh, challenging and compelling, imaginatively organized into a highly readable and well-researched volume looking at the extraordinary growth and importance of the novel form in the United States from the era of realism and naturalism in the late 19th century to the radical disorientation of postmodern texts. Young, emergent scholars offer informed and vital readings of major novels. Very welcome indeed."" Professor Adam Piette, School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, University of Sheffield, Sheffield ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-10-01,Bert Cardullo,Serious Dialogue: Interviews with American Theater Critics,Hardback,9781847188380,29.99,"Serious Dialogue:Interviews with American Theater Critics is a collection of interviews with, and among, America’s most notable theater critics: Robert Brustein, Stanley Kauffmann, Eric Bentley, Gordon Rogoff, and John Simon. Supplementing these interviews are an introductory critic’s apologia by the author, essays on the work of Stark Young and the recently deceased Richard Gilman, and a “guest appearance” by former New York Times drama critic Frank Rich, in addition to a bibliography of American theater criticism and a chronology of published criticism prior to the modern period. The book’s thesis is not only the generally accepted one that serious American drama has long been in decline on account of insurmountable competition from television and the cinema, among other technologies. The thesis of Serious Dialogue is also that the decline of American theater in the late twentieth to early twenty-first century is paralleled by, and even attributable to, the decline or disappearance of American theater criticism Not only is there is no book in English that collects interviews with the most noted American theater critics of the twentieth century; there is also no book, like Serious Dialogue, in which so vital, if sometimes vexing, a subject as the current state of American theater and drama is discussed at length. Serious Dialogue: Interviews with American Theater Critics is aimed, then, at those who would be interested in such a subject: the cultivated theater patron and the educated play-reader, as well as scholars, college students, and teachers of university-level courses in theater, drama, criticism, and comparative literature. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-10-01,Andrew Hamilton,Trade and Empire in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World,Hardback,9781847188373,34.99,"Free trade has become a highly politicized term, but its origins, historical context, and application to policy decisions have been largely overlooked. This book examines the relationship between liberal political economy and the changing conception of empire in the eighteenth century, investigating how the doctrine of laissez-faire economics influenced politicians charged with restructuring the transatlantic relationship between Britain and the newly independent America. As prime minister during the peace negotiations to end the American Revolution in 1782–3, Lord Shelburne understood that the British Empire had to be radically reconceived. Informed by the economic philosophies of Adam Smith, he envisioned a new commercial empire based upon trade instead of the archaic model of territorial conquests. Negotiations between Shelburne and the American statesmen Benjamin Franklin and John Adams demonstrate the application of Smith’s commercial theories to the British-American peace settlement. By tracing the genealogy of laissez-faire, this book locates the historical background from which modern ideas of free trade, empire, and cosmopolitanism emerged. Benjamin Vaughan, confidential secretary to Shelburne during the peace talks, is established as an important historical figure, and his treatise, New and Old Principles of Trade Compared (1788), is identified as a significant contribution to the literature of political economy. An interdisciplinary study integrating history, economics, and philosophy, Trade and Empire offers a new perspective on the intellectual history of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-11-01,Sherry R. Truffin,Schoolhouse Gothic: Haunted Hallways and Predatory Pedagogues in Late Twentieth-Century American Literature and Scholarship,Hardback,9781847189936,29.99,"The “Schoolhouse Gothic,” undertaken by insiders and outsiders to the academy alike and embodied both in literature and in academic discourse, draws on Gothic metaphors and themes in representing and interrogating contemporary American schools and educators. Curses from the past take the form of persistent power inequities (of race, gender, class, and age) and, rather ironically, the very Enlightenment that was to save the moderns from rigid, ancient, mystified hierarchies. In Schoolhouse Gothic literature, including works by Stephen King, Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, and David Mamet, school buildings, classrooms, and/or offices, function as traps, or analogues to the claustrophobic family mansions, monasteries, and convents of old. In Schoolhouse Gothic scholarship, the trap is academic objectivity, viewed not as a lofty goal but rather as an institutional strategy of concealment that blinds the scholar to his or her own prejudices and renders even the most well-meaning complicit with inequitable power structures. The combination of curse and trap common to the Gothic scenario produces paranoia, violence, and monstrosity. In Schoolhouse Gothic literature, schools turn students into psychopaths and machines. In the scholarship, the product is discourse, or “epistemic violence” reified. The Schoolhouse Gothic suggests—at the very least—that Americans have become increasingly uneasy about the role of the academy, increasingly mistrustful of its guardians, and increasingly convinced that something sinister lies behind its officially benevolent exterior. ","""Professor Truffin's elegant study defines a literature about school days. Since the Gothic always reveals an alternative history, the hidden underside of experience, these are not the bright happy times of school anthems and graduation speeches, but a history of power abused and trust betrayed. Schoolhouse Gothic makes us look at education and American literature with new eyes. This is an important book, and it will be widely read and admired."" - Charles Crow, Professor Emeritus of English at Bowling Green State University Editor of American Gothic: An Anthology and A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-12-01,Laura Hapke and Lisa A. Kirby,A Class of Its Own: Re-Envisioning American Labor Fiction,Hardback,978-1-4438-0105-8,39.99,"A Class of Its Own positions important and rediscovered American social protest authors within both a scholarly and student-centered context. The volume draws on the expertise and pedagogy of established and younger scholars who move gracefully from theories of what makes a text “working class” to how studies of class empower college teachers and courses. Among the authors discussed in the volume’s essays and prominent in the book’s syllabi section are Zora Neale Hurston, Stephen Crane, Agnes Smedley, and Ana Castillo. ","As the interdisciplinary field of Working-Class Studies grows, books like A Class of Its Own are shaping a new way of thinking about academic work. By linking the scholarly study of working-class literature with strategies for teaching the same texts, this book demonstrates the commitment of Working-Class Studies scholars to make their research not merely smart and insightful but also useful. A Class of Its Own is scholarship that makes a difference. Dr. Sherry Linkon, Professor of English and American Studies and Co-Director of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University Hapke's approach is ... novel and engaging for anyone interested in the many fields that 'Labor's Canvas' encompasses; cultural studies, labor history, art criticism and economic history. Political Biography is also a part of Hapke's palette in that an underlying narrative thread in Labor's Canvas is the political affiliation, and thus implicit sympathy with the labor subject matter, of each of the more than thirty artists under study in the book. Cameron M. Weber, New School for Social Research, EH.NET ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-12-01,Bert Cardullo,American Drama/Critics: Writings and Readings,Paperback,978-1-4438-0035-8,19.99,"""American Drama/Critics: Writings and Readings"" is a collection of essays on acknowledged classics of American drama such as ""Death of a Salesman,"" ""The Glass Menagerie,"" and ""Our Town,"" and on newer but no less esteemed works like David Mamet's ""Glengarry Glen Ross"" and Sam Shepard's ""Buried Child."" Included are interviews with the great American drama critics Eric Bentley and Stanley Kauffmann; a consideration of the practice of American dramaturgy; an analysis of the adaptation to film of several American dramas; and an examination of experimental playwriting and production in the United States, as seen in the work of Gertrude Stein as well as that of other, lesser-known avant-garde dramatists. This book's thesis is not only the generally accepted one that American drama is essentially a representational one and that its avant-garde experiments are just that--experimental detours that ultimate lead back to the main highway of realism and naturalism. The thesis of ""Americam Drama/Critics"" is also that the decline of American drama in the late twentieth to early twenty-first century is paralleled by, and even attributable to, the decline or disappearance of American dramatic criticism. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-01-01,J. D. Ragsdale,American Museums and the Persuasive Impulse: Architectural Form and Space as Social Influence,Hardback,978-1-4438-0130-0,34.99,"In American Museums and the Persuasive Impulse, Professor Ragsdale assesses American museums as means of visual persuasion. He demonstrates that museums, their contents, and their manners of display are as capable of influencing visitors as speeches or advertisements and that an awareness of their social influence provides an insight into the cultural roles of museums. The book considers a diverse array of museums ranging from such national cultural icons as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute to such city museums as the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, and includes separate chapters on museums devoted to modern and contemporary art and to the specialized collections of individual connoisseurs. In addition to these primarily art museums, Professor Ragsdale assesses museums devoted to collections, such as the National Air and Space Museum, and to commemoration and remembrance, such as the National World War II Museum and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. American Museums and the Persuasive Impulse makes an important contribution to the theory of persuasion and to visual communication, art history, and museology. It utilizes a theory of visual signs based on the semiotic theory of C. S. Peirce. In so doing, it demonstrates that museum buildings, the art and other objects contained within them, and the spaces used for display may all be thought of in terms of means of social influence. ","""Ragsdale's study of museums does what many books on visual rhetoric have been unable to accomplish. It develops a rationale, a coherent method and a vocabulary for the study of visual rhetoric. The book is rich in information, anecdote and insight. Finally, the book is brilliantly and fluently written. "" —Dr. Andrew A King, Professor of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, LA. ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-01-01,E. Joe Johnson and Byron R. Wells,An American Voltaire: Essays in Memory of J. Patrick Lee,Hardback,978-1-4438-0142-3,39.99,"This collection of essays was assembled to honor the memory of the late, eminent Voltaire scholar J. Patrick Lee. It includes seventeen essays by prominent scholars from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and France on a variety of topics in French eighteenth-century studies. Essay titles include: “A New Genre: l’Opéra moral / Moral Opera in Eighteenth-Century France,” “Voltaire and the Uses of Censorship: The Example of the Lettres Philosophiques,” “Enlightenment Intertextuality: The Case of Heraldry in the Encyclopédie méthodique,” “Sex as Satire in Voltaire's Fiction,” “Violence, Levity, and the Dictionary in Old Regime France: Chaudon’s Dictionnaire anti-philosophique,” “L’abbé, l’amazone, le bon roi et les frelons,” “Greuze’s Self-Portraits: Figures of Artistic Identity,” “From Forest to Field: Sylvan Elegists of Eighteenth-Century France,” “The Falsification of Voltaire's Letters and the Public Persona of the Author: From the Lettres secrettes (1765) to the Commentaire historique (1776),” “The Baron de Saint-Castin, Bricaire de la Dixmerie, and Azakia (1765),” “John Law and the Rhetoric of Calculation,” “‘Le Roi des Bulgares’: Was Voltaire's Satire on Frederick the Great just too Opaque?” “Voltaire and the Voyage to Rome,” “Textual liaisons: Voltaire, Paméla and Don Quixote,” “Les petits livres du grand homme: polémique et combat philosophique chez Voltaire,” “Sentimental Horror: Enlightenment Tragedy and the Rise of the Genre Terrible,” “Voltaire and the Comic Genre: Polemics and Rhetoric.” ","""The volume evidences qualities of Pat Lee's own scholarship: the attention to detail, the challenging and/or refining of accepted ideas, the stimulus to further research, in sum, the desire to encourager les autres."" Simon Davies, Queens University Belfast in New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century Journal, Spring 2010 ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-01-01,"John Allphin Moore, Jr.",Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life at Its Centenary,Hardback,978-1-4438-0104-1,29.99,"As of 2005, Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life, first published in 1909, had gone through eleven different printings, from a variety of publishing houses, suggesting its enduring stature as an American classic. The book had an acknowledged influence on early to mid-twentieth-century American politics and political thought. Theodore Roosevelt read the book after he left the White House and, when he decided to run for another term as president in 1912, used Croly’s themes in his campaign. After Willard and Dorothy Straight read the book, they contacted Croly, and brought him together with Walter Lippmann and Walter Weyl to edit the journal they founded in 1914—The New Republic. In 1961, Charles Forcey announced, in The Crossroads of Liberalism, that “Croly’s Promise of American Life of 1909 has become the prevailing political faith of most Americans.” Following Franklin Roosevelt’s Croly-inspired New Deal, the New Frontier and the Great Society of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson seemed, by the 1960s, to have confirmed Forcey’s assessment and thus Croly’s ascendant place in American politics. While the rise of a notable conservative backlash to American liberalism dimmed Croly’s reputation by the end of the century, his book has continued to be part of the canon, often studied in college seminars; and even today his name surfaces in public policy discussions. This anthology, analyzing The Promise at its 100th birthday, presents essays by historians, political scientists, an economist, and an international relations scholar discussing the impact of Croly’s book on twentieth-century America and opining on the suitability of The Promise’s ideas for the twenty-first century. ","“Exploring the strengths and weaknesses of Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life, these  thoughtful, well-researched essays examine its role in the transformation of American liberalism during the past century. The anthology is especially welcome at a time when many Americans look for a new beginning in our national life.” —Robert C. Bannister, Senior Research Scholar, Swarthmore College “The essays in this volume—sharply argued with widely disparate subjects―remind us why Croly’s book received such acclaim for so long and why its ideas hold resonance today. The essays draw us engagingly into Croly’s views and their influences, evoking the zest and energy of the ideas themselves.” —Janet Farrell Brodie, Chair, Department of History, Claremont Graduate University. ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-01-01,Gypsey Elaine Teague,Presentations of the 29th Annual SW/Texas Regional Meeting of the Popular Culture and American Culture Association: Gender,Hardback,978-1-4438-0135-5,39.99," Gender is an often misunderstood subject area, even within the discipline even to those who teach and write about it. One of my presenters, when she first approached me to present at the conference, asked, “What does my paper really have to do with gender”? To me the answer was obvious; everything has to do with gender. Gender is everywhere from the cradle to the grave. What color blanket are we given at birth? What clothes are we laid out in at death? We are bombarded with advertisements specifically targeted at our gender, either male, female, or somewhere in between. We are judged by our gender, which is often synonymous with our sex, although in many of the presentations through the years it is becoming evident that more and more people understand the difference. Our clothing, food, entertainment, and reading material are all tied to gender, in one form or another. Gender is like the air. It is all around us, seldom thought of, but always present. In an area that spans literature, politics, sex, religion, and personal choices it is hard to get finite and clear cut delineations. The contributors are the main focus here and I have just been the ringmaster of this incredible circus of ideas. Without them this could never have gone to press and it is all our hopes that you enjoy the volume and take something away from it that you did not anticipate. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-01-01,Benjamin D. Carson,"Sovereignty, Separatism, and Survivance: Ideological Encounters in the Literature of Native North America",Hardback,978-1-4438-0121-8,34.99,"This collection, broad in its scope, explores rich and multi-faceted literary works by and about Native Americans from the “long” early American period to the present. What links these essays is a concern for the ways in which Native Americans have navigated, negotiated, and resisted dominant white ideology since the founding of the Republic. Importantly, these essays are historically situated and consider not only the ways in which indigenous peoples are represented in American literature and history, but pay much needed attention to the actual lived experiences of Native Americans inside and outside of native communities. By addressing cross-cultural protest, resistance to dominant white ideology, the importance to Natives of land and land redress, sovereignty, separatism, and cultural healing, Sovereignty, Separatism, and Survivance contributes to our understanding of the discrepancy between ideological representations of native peoples and the real-life consequences those representations have for the ways in which indigenous peoples live out their daily lives. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-01-01,Lori Maguire,The Foreign Policy Discourse in the United Kingdom and the United States in the “New World Order”,Hardback,978-1-4438-0131-7,44.99,"The goal of this book is to examine some of the major foreign policy debates in the United Kingdom and the United States in the period from 1992 to 2008: from the end of the Cold War and the aftermath of the first Gulf War to the 2008 American presidential election. The first President Bush spoke in 1991 of a “new world order” – which seemed to mean an American hegemony. The United States was now the world’s only superpower, although a superpower afflicted with weaknesses, especially economic ones. But by 2008 the “new world order” did not seem so new or so strongly American. The period saw the terrorist attacks against the U.S. of 11 September 2001, military problems for the superpower in Afghanistan and Iraq and, by the summer of 2008, near economic collapse. In all of these developments, Britain shared to a lesser or a greater extent. It is hoped that this book will shed an important light both on each nation and on the so-called “special relationship” between the two. Furthermore, this book is also not specifically concerned with policy or how policy is made but with the debate around policy and the rhetoric used to present different points of view. “The ‘Special Relationship’ between the US and Britain remains an enigmatic, ever-changing, but still very powerful factor in world politics. As an examination of their foreign policy discourses reveals, from the perspective of culture and values, few Western countries are as different as the United Kingdom and the US. With very few exceptions – the foreign policies of Gladstone and Tony Blair, and Chruchillian rhetoric, unmatched by his supremely realpolitical politics – British governments abhor talking about values and ideals. The British cultural peculiarity is to dismiss ideology and values as packaging, only to be caught by surprise time and again that they cannot do “business with Herr Hitler”, or that people kill each other for their values, religions, constructed identities and ideologies. Most American governments, by contrast, have had ideological and moral crusades embroidered on their banners in their foreign policy. There is a convergence with Britain when both proclaim that all they are doing is in their self-interest, but the Americans unashamedly assume that what is good for America is good for the world, while the British discourse, with the UK’s decline since 1945, rarely goes that far. As an analysis of their discourses reveals, the ‘Special Relationship’ is thus clearly founded on something either deeper or more superficial than shared culture or values; this volume sheds light on this surprising fact in most illuminating ways, and Lori Maguire’s achievement in bringing together these examinations is praiseworthy indeed.” —Prof. Beatrice Heuser, University of Reading ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-02-01,Bożenna Chylińska,Ideology and Rhetoric: Constructing America,Hardback,978-1-4438-0163-8,49.99," The discovery of America and its further development into a modern state and a nation are the clear instance of how ideology and rhetoric are entwined and how they can encompass widely disparate viewpoints. The essays collected in this book address the topical issues of modern American Studies: cultural difference and otherness; gender, race and ethnicity; class and power. They represent new texts and contexts, approached through the revision, reevaluation, and reconfiguration of cannons, thus accommodating the expectations of the heterodox audience. Femininity reconsidered; an ideology of passing away in contemporary world of technical development; race captured within the framework of identity and gender; the rhetoric of blackness approached through racial exploitation; American conquest ideology revealed in a mission of Manifest Destiny; the 20th century assimilation rhetoric in the relations between Native Americans and the US federal government; the conservative ideology and apologetic rhetoric of the Antebellum South; the critique of the 21st century American legal system; the evolution of the presidential rhetoric which today addresses a large heterogeneous audience – all these topics impose a transnational interpretation of American culture which developed as a result of the cross-cultural transformation of European culture/cultures, moulded on American soil to finally become a unique reformulation of the very idea of America itself. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-02-01,Robert J. Andreach,John Guare’s Theatre: The Art of Connecting,Hardback,978-1-4438-0179-9,34.99,"From the 1960s to the present day, John Guare’s plays have ranged from one-act to cyclic, realistic to surrealistic, naturalistic to experimental, and tragic to comic dramas. This study’s approach to the cornucopia the playwright himself provided when in an interview he gave a fundamental aesthetic principle of his craft. Like a person—and Guare’s plays develop the personal as well as the artistic self—a play must be grounded in reality; only then can it soar. The ground is traditional theatre with characters, no matter how larger than life they can be, and plot, no matter how illogical it can be. The soaring is in interrupting the action with monological narratives and musical interludes, bringing characters back from the dead, and having the action take hairpin turns into a mixture of genres and styles, modes and tones. In verbal and visual images, the flight invokes works by authors as varied as Aeschylus and Whitman, Dante and Feydeau, Verdi and Romberg. Soaring from ground to new ground, the theatre creates the transmission of the American heritage in Lake Hollywood, an idealism corrupted by a fraudulent American Dream in Lydie Breeze, and the recovery of the past in A Few Stout Individuals. As Guare said about his plays: they “interconnect.” ","""Taking Guare at his word that his plays interconnect, Andreach, a scholar of modern American theater, seeks a thread that weaves through hide wide ranging drama since the 1960s. He treats the plays in groups, beginning with his introduction focused on the early one-act plays."" 2010 Book News Inc. Portland ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-02-01,Michelle Pacht,The Subversive Storyteller: The Short Story Cycle and the Politics of Identity in America,Hardback,978-1-4438-0165-2,34.99,"The Subversive Storyteller: The Short Story Cycle and the Politics of Identity in America examines how nineteenth- and twentieth-century American authors adapted and expanded the short story cycle to convey subversive or controversial ideas without alienating readers and threatening their ability to succeed within the literary marketplace. The twelve authors highlighted here come from a wide range of cultural, racial, and geographic backgrounds. Their texts represent different, more advanced stages in the development of the short story cycle as each exploits the fragmentation and inherent lack of cohesion of the genre to reflect the changing realities of life in America during key moments in its history. In tracing the development of the short story cycle through the first two centuries of America’s literary tradition, The Subversive Storyteller fills a gap in existing scholarship on the genre. It examines how short story cycles by Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles W. Chesnutt, Willa Cather, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Louise Erdrich are held together, the publication history of each text (the parts as well as the whole), the revisions made by both authors and editors, and the state of the literary profession at the time each was written. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-04-01,Michael Brody and Lawrence Rubin,Messages: Self Help Through Popular Culture,Paperback,978-1-4438-0484-4,14.99,"Using the authors’ clinical practices and their teaching experiences, along with a series of quotes from movies, TV, advertising and music, this book will help the reader navigate real-world issues. For instance, “Show me the money,” from Jerry Maguire, offers sound financial advice, and “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” from Gone with the Wind, provides insight about love and loss. These references from popular culture help clarify and instruct; they also explain that the prevalence of images, sounds, and words that surround us have something to offer. Indeed, the book allows the authors to come from behind their couches and give direct practical advice, as well as information about ourselves, from the everyday echoes of popular culture. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/popular-culture-meets-psychology/200907/self-help-through-popular-culture-i-money ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-06-01,Lydia Plath and Sergio Lussana,"Black and White Masculinity in the American South, 1800-2000",Hardback,978-1-4438-0596-4,39.99,"This book consists of a range of essays written by historians and literary critics which examine the historical construction of Southern masculinities, rich and poor, white and black, in a variety of contexts, from slavery in the antebellum period, through the struggle for Civil Rights, right up to the recent South. Building on the rich historiography of gender and culture in the South undertaken in recent years, this volume aims to highlight the important role Southern conceptions of masculinity have played in the lives of Southern men, and to reflect on how masculinity has intersected with class, race and power to structure the social relationships between blacks and whites throughout the history of the South. The volume highlights the multifaceted nature of Southern masculinities, demonstrating the changing ways black and white masculinities have been both imagined and practised over the years, while also emphasizing that conceptions of black and white masculinity in the American South rarely seem to be divorced from wider questions of class, race and power. ","""Expansive in scope, revealing in detail, and imaginative in research materials, this collection is a welcome addition to investigations into the pliable nature of southern masculinities. ...the pleasure of reading these essays, whose scholarly perspective and historical inquiry are rewarding. That they point to larger theoretical issues that have not yet been resolved only further enhances their value."" Steve Blakenship, Georgia Highlands College, Journal of Southern History, Vol. 76, No. 4, November 2010 ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-06-01,"Claudia Slate, with April Van Camp",Florida Studies: Proceedings of the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Florida College English Association,Hardback,978-1-4438-0617-6,39.99,"This volume contains a lot of variety, an eclectic mix of Florida literature and history by scholars from across the state representing every kind of institution of higher learning. The first section, Pedagogy, highlights essays about employing service learning, blogging, and primary archival research into the classroom, among other techniques. The Old Florida section includes essays exploring the following topics as diverse as the first black general in Florida (1791), poet Wallace Stevens, and the memoirs of colonial Florida women. The next section—Contemporary Florida—contains essays on EPCOT theme park, Florida newspapers, the rhetoric of Carl Haissen, and the stereotyped poor white Southerner. Jim Morrison’s use of Floridian imagery is the topic of the essay in Natural Florida, and the poem “Pineapple Grill” falls into the category Creative Showcase. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-06-01,Jopi Nyman ,Post-National Enquiries: Essays on Ethnic and Racial Border Crossings,Hardback,978-1-4438-0593-3,39.99,"The studies collected in this volume address a variety of cultural narratives of diverse border crossings. Through their focus on various historical and contemporary border phenomena in Europe and the United States, the essays show that the border-crossing migrant challenges the view that people belong to one particular nation-state and culture. The essays in the first part of the volume explore of the problematics of “race” in theoretical and practical border crossings including the theories of sociologist Paul Gilroy, multicultural casting in American theatre, and the fiction of James Baldwin. In the second part the focus is on encounters with whiteness and problems of constructing ethnic identity in the cinema of Elia Kazan, Jewish American fiction, and Toni Morrison’s most recent novel A Mercy (2008). The third part of the volume explores the sites and practices of border by providing case analyses of the Muslim veil in Europe and the Finnish-Russian border. The final part of the volume is devoted to the problematization of borders in the fiction of the South Asian American writer Bharati Mukherjee. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-07-01,Roscoe Barnes III,F.F. Bosworth: The Man behind “Christ the Healer”,Hardback,978-1-4438-1004-3,34.99,"When the Pentecostal movement exploded in 1906 in Zion City, Ill., Fred Francis Bosworth was present. When the Assemblies of God was being formed, Bosworth served as one of its leaders. He also was present as a mentor to the tent revivalists in the 1940s and 1950s. This book is about the life and ministry of Bosworth (1877-1958), a Pentecostal pioneer, musician, famous healing evangelist, and the author of Christ the Healer. He reportedly led over a million people to Christ, and was considered by scholars and ministers alike to be one of the most successful healing evangelists of his era. His writings on divine healing influenced many church leaders of his day, as well many who claim healing ministries today. While many people are familiar with his book, Christ the Healer, few know much about the man behind the book. F.F. Bosworth is the first book to offer a critical analysis of Bosworth's life and ministry from the beginning to the end. The purpose of this work is to explore his life and ministry in order to identify and analyze some of the factors that contributed to his success as a famous healing evangelist. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-07-01,Verena Theile and Marie Drews,"Reclaiming Home, Remembering Motherhood, Rewriting History: African American and Afro-Caribbean Women’s Literature in the Twentieth Century",Hardback,978-1-4438-0962-7,44.99,"Reclaiming Home, Remembering Motherhood, Rewriting History: African American and Afro-Caribbean Women’s Literature in the Twentieth Century offers a critical valuation of literature composed by black female writers and examines their projects of reclamation, rememory, and revision. As a collection, it engages black women writers’ efforts to create more inclusive conceptualizations of community, gender, and history, conceptualizations that take into account alternate lived and written experiences as well as imagined futures. Contributors to this collection probe the realms of gender studies, postcolonialism, and post-structural theory and suggest important ways in which to explore connections between home, motherhood, and history across the multifarious narratives of African American and Afro-Caribbean experiences. Together they argue that it is through their female characters that black women writers demonstrate the tumultuous processes of deciphering home and homeland, of articulating the complexities of mothering relationships, and of locating their own personal history within local and national narratives. Essays gathered in this collection consider the works of African American women writers (Pauline Hopkins, Toni Morrison, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Audre Lorde, Lalita Tademy, Lorene Cary, Octavia Butler, Zora Neale Hurston, and Sherley Anne Williams) alongside the works of black women writers from the Caribbean (Jamaica Kincaid and Gisèle Pineau), Guyana (Grace Nichols), and Cuba (María de los Reyes Castillo Bueno). ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-07-01,Grzegorz Kość and Krzysztof Majer,Tools of Their Tools: Communications Technologies and American Cultural Practice,Hardback,978-1-4438-0978-8,44.99,"The book explores the role of communication technologies in American cultural practice over the last 150 years. Communication technologies are here understood to include audio and visual reproduction technologies, analogue telecommunications such as traditional telephony, radio and television broadcasts, digital telecommunications, computer-mediated communications, telegraphy, and computer networks. The study of the impact of such technologies is a way to explore the various flows and tensions of American culture. How has American society molded communication technologies? How have they, in turn, shaped American history? Are Americans still, in the words of Thoreau, ""tools of their tools""? More so or less than during the philosopher's Walden days? How do America's cultural, ethical, and economic assumptions determine and limit the ways in which telecommunications function in American society? Fascinating questions abound. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-09-01,Sabrina Fuchs-Abrams,Literature of New York,Hardback,978-1-4438-1242-9,34.99,"Literature of New York is the first collection of critical essays to look at historical and contemporary images of New York through an examination of works of literature by New York writers about New York. New York City is a study in contradictions; it offers at once a sense of possibility, cultivation, self-realization and a fear of corruption, decay, and despair. The literature of New York is representative of American national identity and of the unique nature of the metropolitan, urban experience. The essays are arranged chronologically to reflect the changing significance of the city in relation to various movements in American literary and cultural history. It includes essays on the relation of urban public space to various editions of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass; the theme of surveillance in the literature of New York by Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, and Ann Petry; fear of the cultural Other within modern New York in Henry James’ ""The Jolly Corner""; use of the setting of New York City to emphasize both the dynamic energy and increasing anxiety of the modern American cityscape in Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer (1925); the satiric portrayal of New York society in the 1920s and 30s in Dorothy Parker's recently collected stories and sketches; the response to post-WWII New York City in fictionalized autobiography in the personal narratives of Audre Lorde and Diane di Prima; the poetics of second generation New York School poet Ted Berrigan in relation to his predecessors; the representation of New York in postmodern fiction, depicting at once a sense of loss at the inability to return to the old neighborhood of the past in Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis and the possibility of reasserting order and meaning amidst the chaos and terror of post-911 New York in Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006). Whether expressing nostalgia for the past, hope for the future, fear of the unknown, or the possibility of self-actualization, the literature of New York continues to draw inspiration from its locale and is as complex, contradictory, and creative as the City itself. Contributors include Karen Karbiener, Mark James Noonan, Jonathan Readey, Heidi E. Bollinger, Sabrina Fuchs-Abrams, Kirsten Bartholomew Ortega, Michael Angelo Tata, Jessica Maucione, and Sonia Baelo-Allué. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-11-01,Catherine Morley and Alex Goody,American Modernism: Cultural Transactions,Hardback,978-1-4438-1357-0,39.99,"Encompassing writers from Edith Wharton, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot to Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser and Gertrude Stein, American Modernism: Cultural Transactions is a comprehensive and informative companion to the field of American literary modernism. This groundbreaking new book explores the changing patterns of American literary culture in the early years of the 20th century, in the aftermath of the great American Renaissance, when the United States was well on its way to becoming the most economically powerful and culturally influential nation in the world. It brings together some of the most eminent British and European scholars to investigate how the United States’s unique cultural position is in fact the by-product of a range of cultural transactions between the United States and Europe, between the visual and the literary arts, and between the economic and aesthetic worlds. And it presents a stunning re-examination of the social, cultural and artistic contours of American modernism, from the impact of a liberal Scottish speaker on T.S. Eliot’s considerations of Shakespeare to the generic hybridity of Edith Wharton’s writing, from the influence of Oscar Wilde on Hart Crane to the effect of Anglo-European experimentalism on Native American fiction – and much more. Through close textual and archival analysis, backed up with compelling historical insights, these nine new essays explore the nature and limits of American modernism. They address such topical issues as geomodernism, transnationalism and the nature of American identity; they examine the ways writers embraced or rejected the emerging modern world; and they take a fresh look at American literature in the broad context of international modernism. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-01-01,"Susana Araújo, João Ferreira Duarte and Marta Pacheco Pinto","Trans/American, Trans/Oceanic, Trans/lation: Issues in International American Studies",Hardback,978-1-4438-1650-2,44.99,"I took a trip down to L’America To trade some beads for a pint of gold. Jim Morrison As the title indicates, Trans/American, Trans/Oceanic, Trans/lation points towards the International American Studies Society’s aims to promote cross-disciplinary study and teaching of the Americas regionally, hemispherically, nationally and transnationally. But it also reflects, less strategically but more forcefully, the heterogeneous and often unexpected themes, topics and motifs addressed in this forum. These articles are revealing in that they give face and expression to the evolving trends and preoccupations in the field. In various ways and from different disciplinary angles, the essays explore key questions in International American Studies: what have been the symbolic and material relations between the “Americas” and the “USA,” and between “America” and the “World”? What are the meanings and workings of these four entities when examined across nations, cultures and languages? In what ways does American experience contribute to the global (re-)production of social, cultural and economic practices? ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-03-01,William M. Etter,"The Good Body: Normalizing Visions in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, 1836-1867",Hardback,978-1-4438-1856-8,44.99,"The Good Body: Normalizing Visions in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, 1836–1867 examines literary and cultural representations of so-called “normal” and “abnormal” bodies in the antebellum and Civil War-era United States and the ways in which these representations operated as a means of justifying, critiquing, and problematizing prominent concerns of the period: the relationship between the health of American citizens and national progress, Western expansion, debates over slavery, the threatened dissolution of the Union in the Civil War, and the legitimation of the post-war reunified nation. Considering a wide range of sources—classic works of non-fiction, fiction, and poetry; health reform textbooks; proslavery documents; photographs of Civil War veterans; and Civil War medical records of the federal government—this study demonstrates that American literature of this period typically imagined real and fictional bodies as healthy, aesthetically pleasing, and symbolically coherent in relation to other bodies imagined as deviating from these “norms” to preserve existing political and social orders but also, at times, to challenge the hegemonic power of US institutions. In addition to the literary material considered, central in this book are critical approaches to history and disability studies which illuminate the construction of physical “normality” and contribute to recent scholarly attempts to assess the significance of physical differences in the literature and culture of the United States. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-04-01,Francis McCollum Feeley,"Comparative Patriarchy and American Institutions: The Language, Culture, and Politics of Liberalism",Hardback,978-1-4438-1936-7,44.99,"As Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote in his book, La pensée sauvage (Paris,1960): “biographical and anecdotal history … is low-powered history, which is not intelligible in itself, and only becomes so when it is transferred en bloc to a form of history of a higher power than itself … The historian’s relative choice … is always confined to the choice between history which teaches more and explains less and history which explains more and teaches less.” This book oscillates between analysis, which tries to explain what man is, and anecdote, which tries to teach what he is capable of becoming. What better approach to understanding patriarchy, beyond learning the formal dictionary definitions of this term, than by examining the richly diverse descriptions of gender relationships found in the following chapters? It is the hope of these authors that the recognition of national differences and gender differences will provide new vantage points from which we may gain wider perspectives on our own prejudices and thereby find fulfillment of our aspirations to become more fully human. ","""The essays in this book explore numerous aspects of the male/female relationship in the United States of America - from the formation of male/female identities in society at the time of the so-called Founding Fathers, to the little known relationship of the U.S. military with the banal terrorism in contemporary family life; from gender relationships specific to the early American slave system, to the universe of the American female prison population. The third part and final part of this anthology, entitled Women against Reality, offers an analysis of the rich variety of women's struggles for equality in the sphere of political rights and ideological conventions."" - Marc Ollivier, Economist at the CNRS, author, and editor of the recent book, Avec les paysans du monde. Researcher in social sciences at the prestigious French research institute, the CNRS. He has worked in North Africa (Morocco and Algeria) from years 1957 to 1972. Dr. Ollivier has published many articles on the topics of development strategies, especially in the field of agrarian reform. He is a member of the ISMEA (Institut Des Sciences Mathématiques et Economiques Appliquées) and a co-editor of the review ""Informations et commentaires, le développement en questions"". His most recent publication is Avec les paysans du monde (Paris, 2008). ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-04-01,F. Suzanne Bowers,"Republican, First, Last, and Always: A Biography of B. Carroll Reece",Hardback,978-1-4438-1916-9,39.99,"Republican, First, Last, and Always: A Biography of B. Carroll Reece examines the political culture that created an intense fervor of anti-communism in America. From 1920 to 1961, B. Carroll Reece served a then unprecedented thirty-five years in the United States House of Representatives. A close friend of Robert Taft, Reece served as Chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1946–1948 and used his position as chairman to push anti-communism to the forefront of the Republican Party’s national agenda and to help Taft try to win the presidency. His background in finance and economics led him to believe that capitalism remained America’s strongest defense against communism. He worked to eradicate any threat to the capitalist system—from trying to block government development of the Muscle Shoals Dam projects in Alabama in the 1920s to forming a congressional committee that attacked foundations created by the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie families in the 1950s. Reece’s downfall and death represented the demise of Old Guard conservatives within the Republican Party as new leaders and new issues became the center of Republican politics, and his investigation contributed to the animosity towards foundations and large concentrations of wealth that continues today. ","“Bowers’s book is an important contribution to our understanding of the conservative anti-Communist movement of the late 1940s through the early 1960s. Congressman B. Carroll Reece of East Tennessee was a figure of considerable significance in that movement, but until now he has been neglected by historians. Bowers has thoroughly mined the available sources, especially Reece’s voluminous personal papers. Her extensive research in those sources and her wide reading in the historiography of the era enable her to offer a full and engaging portrait of both the public man and the private man and to situate him in the context of his times. This book should be read by everyone interested in mid-twentieth-century American politics.” —Professor Stephen V. Ash, Distinguished Professor in Humanities, University of Tennessee, USA ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-04-01,Jessica Datema and Diane Krumrey,Wretched Refuge: Immigrants and Itinerants in the Postmodern,Hardback,978-1-4438-1904-6,34.99,"Recent literary expressions of the immigrant experience reveal the postmodern narrative obsession with the immigrant as cultural and political outlier. Wretched Refuge: Immigrants and Itinerants in the Postmodern asks us to reimagine this preoccupation with what Junot Diaz calls the “actual flows of third world bodies” as part of a larger, more pertinent motif of the postmodern itinerant. As a figure of cultural becoming, the itinerant stands for displacement and dispersion, exceeding the confines of physical location, political subjectivity, and relation to the natural world. Thus, Wretched Refuge seeks to map the cosmopolitan positionalities of an immigrant or exilic experience: the itinerant, the migrant, and other “foreign” bodies. The essays in Wretched Refuge consider fiction, memoir, and pop-culture genres that reconceive time, space, and the shifting situatedness of the subject within nature, politics, and culture. The book weaves together modern and postmodern visions of itinerancy in the writings of Cormac McCarthy, Bob Dylan, Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jhumpa Lahiri, Roberto Bolaño, Paul Bowles, and Bill McKibben, among others. Throughout these radically different narratives, the trace of the itinerant suggests a cosmopolitan response to localized anxieties about global hegemony. ","“Wretched Refuge is a great resource for a scholar seeking to reconcile the western longings of Frederick Jackson Turner with the dictatorial illusions of Duvalier and Trujillo; for a scholar looking for a new paradigm with which to discuss Dylan and Marley.” —Ferentz Lafargue, Assistant Professor of Literary Studies, Eugene Lang College, The New School for LIberal Arts, New York, USA ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-05-01,Gloria Robinson Boyd,African American Religious Experiences: A Case Study of Twentieth Century Trends and Practices,Hardback,978-1-4438-1983-1,34.99,"African Americans encountered many challenges throughout history facing slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and other forms of racism. Many relied on religion as their source of strength and endurance. The African American religious experience is a story of survival that demonstrates how religion became the key ingredient that allowed a race to adapt and survive the harshest systems of injustice and prejudice in America. Religion became the greatest universal and dynamic tool of survival adopted by enslaved individuals and the utmost weapon known to the black race. African American religious practices, a blend of African and European traditions, are distinctively unique because of worship styles and contemplative practices; all reflective of the vital role religion played in the lives of blacks during slavery and beyond. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-06-01,Elizabeth Boyle and Anne-Marie Evans,Writing America into the Twenty-First Century: Essays on the American Novel,Hardback,978-1-4438-2133-9,34.99,"Writing America into the Twenty-First Century: Essays on the American Novel seeks to explore an exciting period in American literary scholarship. Concentrating on novels written after 1990 and through to the new millennium and to the present day, this collection presents a refreshing and much-needed analysis of recent American fiction. Representing the work of established scholars and emerging critical voices, the essays interrogate a range of fiction including works by Philip Roth, Jeffrey Eugenides, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy. Accessible to students, scholars and the interested reader, this invigorating collection navigates the works of several key male American authors of the last twenty years and, in so doing, offers a new way of examining the American novel. This volume’s strength lies in its careful academic focus on recent American fiction and seeks to re-acquaint the reader with well-known authors and introduce them to new literary voices such as Christopher John Farley, Anthony Giardina and Daniel Suarez. The collection is organised into four large topic areas: ‘Youth and Age,’ ‘War and Crime,’ ‘Culture’ and ‘Spaces and Patterns.’ Each essay deals with its own particular subject and author but the full impact of each section on the concept of writing the American novel into the present day can only really be understood when read in conjunction with the others. Writing America, a companion volume to Reading America: New Perspectives on the American Novel (2008) would be a valuable asset to any university or branch library. The volume will also attract strong interest from established academics, especially those researching the fields of literature, critical theory, cultural history and politics. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-07-01,Ibtihaj S. Arafat and P. Chudi Uwazurike,"At Home Dads and Sex Role Reversals: Men, Gender and Family in a Changing America",Hardback,978-1-4438-2223-7,34.99,,,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-07-01,Brenda M. Greene,The African Presence and Influence on the Cultures of the Americas,Hardback,978-1-4438-2216-9,34.99,"The African Presence and Influence on the Cultures of the Americas, an interdisciplinary collection of essays by scholars and writers whose disciplines include but are not limited to literature, languages, linguistics, history, sociology and psychology, reflects the complexity and diversity of the historical and cultural legacy of the African diasporic reality and provides a critical perspective for examining the persistence of African cultural traditions in the Americas. These writers and scholars explore the ways in which people connected by moments in history and the common legacies of racism, classism, colonialism and imperialism, have used literature, music, dance, religion and cultural rites and rituals to survive and resist. The poetry and prose of Afro-Cuban icon, Nicolás Guillén and Afro-American literary legend, Gwendolyn Brooks provide a context for exploring these themes. Guillén and Brooks symbolize the triumph of the human spirit and the “Africanisms” present amongst people who share a common legacy originating in Africa. Building on the themes in the work of these poets, the scholars and writers in The African Presence and Influence on the Cultures of the Americas examine the nature, persistence and impact of these themes in literature, language, music, dance and religion. The scholarship generated in this collection has implications for the ways in which we read, study and teach cultural studies, literature, history, language, African American Studies, Caribbean Studies and Africana Studies. ","“This collection, The Impact of Africa on the Culture of the Americas, is a must read for those teaching courses related to the literature and cultures of the African diaspora and for scholars committed to this research. The writers and scholars in this collection provide a critical lens from which to view the ways in which “Africanisms” present in the poetry, fiction, essays, dance and music in the Americas embody similar themes and patterns. By drawing upon the disciplines of history, sociology, literature, linguistics, music and dance, they offer readers a context for examining the emergence of these shared cultural practices, rituals and traditions of people throughout the African diaspora. Prof. Greene has assembled a group of essays that will offer academics a valuable contribution to African diasporic studies.” —Joyce E. King, Ph.D., Benjamin E. Mays Endowed Chair for Urban Teaching, Learning & Leadership and Professor of Educational Policy Students, Georgia State University “The African Presence and Influence on the Cultures of the Americas will be an important contribution to Africana belles letters because of its interdisciplinarity. As Dr. Daisy Cocco De Fillippis indicates in the foreword, The African Presence and Influence on the Cultures of the Americas captures the ebullient spirit of scholars from seven institutions engaged in an intercampus discussion on the impact of Africa in the Americas. Their essays reinforce the linkages wrought by the African presence among the many diverse cultures of the Americas. While Dr. Brenda Greene in the introduction notes at least seven disciplines represented by the writers, she also emphasizes the common themes that they share. The organization of the book—its fourteen chapters and division into four sections—provides diverse approaches to teaching the text to college students. As a Caribbeanist and Professor of English, I welcome this book to further the conversation began in the comparable texts edited and published between 1993 and 2006 by Joseph Harris, Isidore Okpewho & Carole Boyce Davies, Sheila Walker, Genevieve Fabre & Klaus Benesch, and Michael Gomez.” —Dr. Jacqueline Brice-Finch, Acting Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs, Coppin State University ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-08-01,Emily Caston,Celluloid Saviours: Angels and Reform Politics in Hollywood Film,Hardback,978-1-4438-2269-5,39.99,"In Celluloid Saviours, the author analyses a corpus of US films dating from the silent era that she calls film blanc. In these fantasy films a guardian spirit with extraordinary powers suspends the ordinary, known laws of time and space, and a main character reforms himself or herself in life-changing ways. The author argues that the historical pattern of film blanc relates to the rise and fall of liberal and reform thought in US politics, specifically to conceptions of human nature as a tabula rasa. This conception is evident both in the early feature films featuring angels such as Chaplin’s The Kid and much later examples such as the 1980s box office hit, Trading Places. She argues that this narrative tradition runs from Hollywood’s beginnings to the present day and is foreshadowed in the English ghost stories of Charles Dickens. The classic era of film blanc is epitomised in the enduringly popular film, It’s a Wonderful Life. More recent examples of narrative form analysed by Caston include The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-08-01,Leah A. Murray,Politics and Popular Culture,Hardback,978-1-4438-2259-6,39.99,"In recent years we have seen a continuation and perhaps even acceleration in the trend of popular culture having a discernible effect on politics. From The Daily Show to candidates’ use of Facebook and MySpace, politics have opened up to new technologies as we come online for the next generation. Our political world has become popularized, or our popular world has become politicized in a new way, facilitated by the entertainment media and new technologies. This volume’s authors attempt to make sense of the changing political popular world through a series of interdisciplinary essays that explore the ramifications of popular cultural depictions of politics drawing on literature in a variety of fields: political science, history, literature, fine arts and communications. We explore three major phenomena in a politicized popular culture. First, we explore the role that the entertainment media play in understanding politics. What is interesting about our fictional political worlds is we are allowed, as a people, to consider different political ideals without the baggage of our last vote or our ideology. We can step outside ourselves and challenge the way we think on particular issues. Second, we explore the real world of politics as it has been shaped over the last century of new technology. As powerful a medium television proved to be to politics, the latest technological breakthroughs have proved to be a paradigmatic shift. From Twitter to Facebook, our politicians are able to keep in almost constant contact with their constituencies, which has vast implications for the way political discourse will progress. Third, we explore what happens when the real world and media collide. Entertainment media change their messages when major political events happen such as the case when spymaster tropes were forced to evolve when 9/11 changed the international dynamic. Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne series had to be conceptualized on film in a new way after this event. The more connected our political world and our popular world become, and given the trends, we can only assume they will become increasingly intertwined, the more important it is for us to understand how these connections affect the world. This volume is a powerful pass at comprehending all that is happening across the politicized popular world. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-09-01,Alfred J. Drake,The New Criticism: Formalist Literary Theory in America,Hardback,978-1-4438-2330-2,34.99,"The New Criticism: Formalist Literary Theory in America covers a variety of authors and topics related to the New Criticism of the 1920s-1950s in America. Contributors trace the history of the New Criticism as a movement, consider theoretical and practical aspects of various proponents, and assess the record of subsequent engagement with its tenets. This volume should prove valuable for its renewed concentration not only on the New Critics themselves but also on the way they and their work have been contextualized, criticized, and valorized by theorists and educators during and after their period of greatest influence, both in the United States and abroad. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-10-01,W. Creighton Peden,"Life and Thought of Bernard Eugene Meland, American Constructive Theologian, 1899–1993",Hardback,978-1-4438-2406-4,34.99,"This book deals with Bernard Eugene Meland’s “life” (as presented in his unpublished intellectual autobiography) and “thought” as a constructive theologian who taught in the Divinity School of The University of Chicago (1945-64). When Meland was in the process of completing his doctoral studies at the University of Chicago, he came into close association with Henry Nelson Wieman who was joining the faculty. Meland took the first course Wieman offered in which they read William Ernest Hocking’s The Meaning of God in Human Experience (Part IV) and Whitehead’s Religion in the Making. He audited Wieman’s other courses. The philosophy of A. N. Whitehead played a large role in their relationship and theology. With the sudden death of G. B. Smith, Wieman became Meland’s doctoral advisor. After completing the doctoral program, Meland spent the next year at Marburg University in Germany studying with Rudolf Otto. He came away from this experience having discovered that the stimulus and lure in the language of the arts had become for him an alternative to the moral way of expressing value, sensibility, and fulfillment of human experience. He returned from Europe to begin teaching at Central College in Missouri and in 1936 joined the faculty at Pomona College in Claremont, California. His association with Wieman continued in the 1930s as they co-authored American Philosophies of Religion (1936). While teaching at Central College, Meland authored Modern Man’s Worship (1934), and at Pomona College published Write Your Own Ten Commandments (1938), and The Church and Adult Education (1939). In 1945, Meland joined Wieman at the Divinity School as Professor of Constructive Theology. Although Wieman soon retired, their connection continued throughout Wieman’s life. The Second World War had concluded and Meland was in a state of anguish and despair over the war and especially by the atomic bomb. In this troubled state of mind he published Seeds of Redemption (1947), America’s Spiritual Culture (1948), and The Reawakening of Christian Faith (1949). His next two publications were Higher Education and the Human Spirit (1953) and Faith and Culture (1955), with the latter considered by many as his most important work. While teaching at Chicago, Meland twice served twice as The Barrows Lectures in India. His lectures in 1957-58 were published as The Realities of Faith (1962). In 1963-64, he continued his theme of the relationship between faith and culture by focusing on the impact of secularization on modern cultures. These lectures were published as The Secularization of Modern Cultures (1966). His last book was Fallible Forms and Symbols (1977). In the first section of this book, Meland’s “thought” is considered under four headings: Metaphysical View, Method, Doctrine of God, and View of Religion, followed by an evauation. Section two is devoted to his “Later Writings,” followed by a conclusion. ","“Peden, a leading authority on the history of the empirical tradition in American liberal religion, provides a new in-depth review of Meland’s thought, situating his core theological ideas in the shifting contexts of his major influences, especially G. B. Smith, H. N. Wieman, A. N. Whitehead, and W. James. After Meland’s own ‘Fifty Years of Religious Inquiry,’ readers will find: (1) an elucidation of Meland’s metaphysical construals of reality, creativity, humanity, the structure of experience, faith, and spirituality; (2) an insightful rendering of his development of the method of ‘empirical realism;’ (3) a revealing reflection on his doctrine of God; (4) a succinct exposition of his views on the nature and purpose of religion; and (5) the most invaluable gem of the entire book, an enlightening critical summary of Meland’s later writings (from the 1960s through 1989) that includes many unpublished essays and lectures. Along the way, Peden guides us on an archaeological dig into some of Meland’s most complex theological constructions, and presents probing evaluations of the adequacy and effectiveness of those constructions, particularly Meland’s vexing treatment of the relationship between faith and reason, and his pluralistic view of God.” —Jennifer G. Jesse, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion, Truman State University “Bernard Meland (1899–1993) represented the best in the pragmatic tradition of constructive theology associated with the University of Chicago. In this book Creighton Peden has presented a masterful overview of his work. For those interested in Meland’s thought as well as the various figures who framed it this book is indispensable reading.” —David M. Rasmussen, Professor of Philosophy, Boston College; Editor-in-Chief of Philosophy and Social Criticism ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-11-01,Joan Burbick and William Glass,Beyond Imagined Uniqueness: Nationalisms in Contemporary Perspectives,Hardback,978-1-4438-2409-5,49.99,"Beyond Imagined Uniqueness: Nationalisms in Comparative Perspectives is a collection of essays from a variety of disciplines and theoretical perspectives that explore the contentious issue of nationalism in historical and contemporary settings. They adopt an interdisciplinary approach to the topic of nationalism and its permutations and modes of expression. The unspoken context of these essays is the trends subsumed under the processes of globalization. Though the world may be becoming more integrated economically, these essays suggest social, cultural, and political forces, historically rooted, keep the nation and national identity alive and well. The comparative perspectives offered by the essays appear in two ways: one set is the explicit comparisons of nations made by several authors within their essays and between the essays themselves when the authors focus on developments within a single nation. A second, and indeed more thought-provoking set of comparisons come from the way the essays address nationalism in disparate scholarly approaches that include visual culture, history, sociology, and literature. Moreover, while traditional themes in the study of nationalism are not ignored, these essays expand the discussion with case studies of nationalism in Turkey, Asia, and Eastern Europe. Even when nationalism is considered in those areas that have been the central focus of nationalism studies (Western Europe and the USA), the authors bring unique voices to the conversation as in the use of portraiture as a vehicle of nationalism in Cold War America or children’s literature shaping a Swedish American identity or in the idea of a covenant as a source of Dutch nationalism or the role of minority languages in West European societies. Section One of this volume contains essays that examine the terrain of the national imaginary through language, monuments, and visual culture. Several of the essays in this traverse the cultural sites of representation and commemoration of the nation, looking carefully at the “politics of memory” in places, material objects, and texts. Section Two provides more individual case studies of nations, though many of these essays engage significant regional and international tensions especially in a post Cold War world that has often influenced the internal dynamics of nation-building. Section Three moves the focus away from the nation to immigrant communities, especially those in the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean. Diasporas throughout the world have challenged many theories about the nation, as crossing borders becomes the norm rather the exception. ","“The present collection of essays, including contributions of scholars from all over Europe and the United States, proves that nationalism, described and analyzed from various angles, has recently been very much alive and kicking. Nationalism or, rather, nationalisms of different locations and colors, are still with us and there is little hope that they will disappear in spite of globalization and the spread of such metaphors as the ‘global village.’ The contributors to Beyond Imagined Uniqueness have identified their influence in politics, historiography, and culture, using mainly methods and instruments provided by contemporary cultural studies. It is an important book that sheds much needed light on social processes continuing in all parts of the world.” —Marek Wilczyński, University of Gdańsk, Poland “This book should reignite discussion of a topic which had begun to die out. These contributions by a new generation of Central and Eastern European scholars are especially welcome.” —Hayden White, Presidential Professor of Historical Studies, University of California, USA “Ranging widely across political and linguistic traditions, Beyond Imagined Uniqueness presents a set of challenging and provocative reassessments of nationalism in the context of global culture.” —Eric Sundquist, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, Johns Hopkins University, Maryland, USA ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-11-01,Maria Zina Gonçalves de Abreu and Bernardo Guido de Vasconcelos,John Dos Passos: Biography and Critical Essays,Hardback,978-1-4438-2421-7,39.99,"The contributions in this book draw attention to the close, though sometimes ambiguous, relationship between biography, aesthetics, ideology, social critique and gender in Dos Passos’s writings. Most of the essays are important additions to the ongoing scholarly critique on the author’s works, considered in terms of innovative literary techniques and the myriad of literary representations, as well as of core thematic issues that have helped define Dos Passos both as a towering figure of American Modernism, and outspoken political and social critic. Further to scrutinizing Dos Passos’s biographic aspects and literary innovations, the book also offers invaluable insights into the historiographical, ideological and social dimensions of the American (and to some extent European) society of the time, dominated by unprecedented social and political instability that shattered the ‘American Dream’ of liberty and egalitarianism, and by international warfare. The present collection of essays is a worthy contribution to the growing body of critical studies on John Dos Passos’s writings, which indisputably endorse the status of his literary name. ","“I strongly recommend this collection of essays not only to those interested in John Dos Passos and his work but also to anyone engaged in the study of the complex mix of literary, cultural, and social elements that comprise early twentieth-century modernism. In the past, much of the most innovative Dos Passos criticism has been of European origin, and this collection confirms that tradition.” —Donald Pizer, Pierce Butler Professor of English Emeritus, Tulane University, New Orleans, Los Angeles “Good wine needs no bush, but, oddly, Dos Passos’ long shelf of notable books does. It is time to reassess his achievement—think of the ground-breaking Three Soldiers or the marvelous trilogy collected as USA—and restore him to his place among the great American modernists of the twentieth century.” —George Monteiro, Brown University, USA “Fittingly emerging from the Dos Passos Cultural Centre in Madeira, where Dos Passos’ paternal family originated, this valuable collection looks both backward in time—at the writer’s sense of place in Portugal and of displacement in America; at texts and aesthetic movements that influenced him—and forward—at ongoing critical and social issues of genre, gender, ethnicity, transnationality, and migration. The volume’s diverse scholarly perspectives argue for and demonstrate Dos Passos’ continued significance as narrative innovator and social critic.” —Lisa Nanney, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service-Qatar ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-11-01,H. G. Callaway,Memories and Portraits: Explorations in American Thought,Hardback,978-1-4438-2427-9,39.99,"In Memories and Portraits: Explorations in American Thought, philosopher H. G. Callaway embeds his distinctive contextualism and philosophical pluralism within strands of history and autobiography, spanning three continents. Starting in Philadelphia, and reflecting on the meaning of home in American thought, he offers a philosophically inspired narrative of travel and explorations, in Europe and Africa, illuminating central elements of American thought—partly out of diverse foreign and domestic reactions and fascinating cultural contrasts. This book is of interest for the contemporary interplay of analytic philosophy with American pragmatism and for those focused on the interaction of European and Anglo-American thought and society. In this book, the formalism of analytic philosophy encounters a logically articulate version of the contextualism implicit in the pragmatist tradition; and a deep and abiding interest in natural science is augmented by a more literary account of the social and cultural contexts of inquiry—encountered in many years of travel and life abroad. The final chapter, employing a methodological naturalism, brings the perspectives and lessons, from near and far, back home for renewed reflection. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-11-01,Márta Pellérdi,Nabokov's Palace: The American Novels,Hardback,978-1-4438-2410-1,34.99,"Nabokov’s distinguished and unique position in American literature has always been indisputable, but paradoxical. There has always been an element of foreignness in his writing. Nabokov’s Palace, however, aims to discover those sub-texts and inter-textual patterns embedded in Nabokov’s American novels which undeniably contribute towards making these works an integral part of the Anglo-American literary tradition. Aware of this tradition, in some of his late novels Nabokov also provides a literary historical overview of particular themes, such as friendship, melancholy, madness and trance, as they surfaced in literary texts throughout the history of English and American literature. To Nabokov “aesthetic bliss” meant “a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.” Most of Nabokov’s American novels express—through different elaborate literary structures, themes, motifs and metaphors—these “other states of being” where the “fantastic recurrence” of literary situations and communion with dead poets and writers (Poe, Shakespeare, Hawthorne and Melville, among many others) becomes possible. The American “reality” that some readers miss in his writings (with the exception of Lolita) and the absence of which questions whether Nabokov truly belongs to the Anglo-American tradition, is clearly to be found in the “wayside murmur” of the allusive sub-texts. Nabokov’s Palace is thus recommended for scholars, students and devotees of Nabokov’s fiction who wish to make further discoveries in the distinct “otherworld” of Art in Nabokov’s American novels. ","""If one was looking for a proof that the post-structuralist idea of reading one literary work through another one can with some authors be a splendid strategy of interpretation, Márta Pellérdi’s Nabokov’s Palace: The American Novels could serve as a welcome example. The title of this excellent contribution to the study of Nabokov’s work already suggests her thesis that the novels written since his emigration to the United States are “American Novels” in the sense that they are part of the “Anglo-American tradition”. In order to substantiate this view that so far has not received much attention, Pellérdi reads Nabokov’s novels from the perspective of works by American authors representing that tradition and in this way is able to shed new light even on works that have been widely discussed already. Particularly revealing I found her reading of Lolita in conjunction with Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, of Ada with Melville’s Pierre, and of Nabokov’s last novels Transparent Things, Look at the Harlequins! and the fragmentary The Original of Laura with some tales and poems by Edgar Allan Poe. Thanks to Pellérdi we now know much more about the influence on Nabokov’s work of the literary tradition of the country in which he found refuge. Yet when all is said, one also remembers the quotation in her Introduction of the master plotter pointing out that he is “trilingual” whereas “all the writers I personally knew in America […] are strictly monolinguists” – a polite way of saying that his literary horizon is so much wider than that of the American tradition."" - Prof. Dr. (UWM) em. Herbert Grabes, Department of English Studies, Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen “Marta Pellerdi offers a fresh take on Nabokov's English novels. She makes a compelling argument that thematic and referential elements are crucially embedded in these works. Apart from illuminating examples in the English novels, Pellerdi persuasively analyzes an important avenue of nabokov's influences and extends our understanding of his layered artistry.” —Julia Bader, Professor of English at U C Berkeley …Nabokov’s place will be useful, certainly to undergraduates, as a starting point for further investigation… Barbara Wyllie UCL SSEES University Seer, 90, 1, January 2012 ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-11-01,Tanfer Emin Tunc and Elisabetta Marino,Positioning the New: Chinese American Literature and the Changing Image of the American Literary Canon,Hardback,978-1-4438-2485-9,39.99,"This ground-breaking edited volume includes chapters which explore the past, present and future position of Chinese American authors within the framework of what Harold Bloom identifies as the “Western literary canon.” These selections, which simultaneously represent the exciting “transnational turn” in American literary studies, not only examine whether or not Chinese American literature is inside or outside the canon, but also question if there is, or should be, a literary canon at all. Moreover, they dissect the canonicity of Chinese American literature by elucidating the social, political and cultural implications of inclusion in the canon. Ultimately, however, this collection is designed as a preliminary step towards exploring the impact of Chinese American literature on the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant-dominated American literary world, and probing the by-products of both cultural fusion and cultural collision. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-12-01,Helena Wahlström,"New Fathers? Contemporary American Stories of Masculinity, Domesticity and Kinship",Hardback,978-1-4438-2554-2,34.99,"What do novels such as Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World, and Jayne Anne Phillips’ MotherKind have in common with films such as Smoke and Mrs Doubtfire? This study explores the intersection of masculinity and domesticity in contemporary film and literature. It argues that these texts, produced since the 1990s, address with some urgency the notion of “new fatherhood” in the United States. They offer explorations of the idea that American fatherhood around the turn of the twenty-first century is changing, and they problematize the legitimacy of “new fathers” and “alternative families” in a national culture where the “old” patriarch and the nuclear family still often loom large in the imagination of many Americans. ","“Helena Wahlström’s New Fathers? Contemporary American Stories of Masculinity, Domesticity, and Kinship is a timely and astute critical analysis of key American fictions since the 1990s that deal with changing family structures and particularly with portraits of fathers in relation to their partners, their children, and their own fathers. Solidly placed in the contexts of popular rhetoric and scholarly masculinity studies, the book illuminates current anxieties in American culture about changing family structures and a supposed ‘masculinity crisis.’ . . . In 2000 Sally Robinson’s Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis unpacked fictional representations of privileged men in American fiction. A decade later Wahlström’s study updates feminist analysis of the ways that male and female authors envision new families and the men that inhabit them.” —Judith Kegan Gardiner, Professor of English and of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA; Editor of Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory “The media has been proclaiming the ‘new fatherhood’ for decades. But how do we understand the relationship between masculinity and fathering? In this intriguing study, Helena Wahlström shows how changes among American fathers have been accompanied by images in film and novels that both describe and define the boundaries of the new fatherhood.” —Michael Kimmel, Professor of Sociology, State University of New York, Stony Brook, USA; Author of Manhood in America and The Gendered Society “New Fathers? offers an innovative and original analysis on active fatherhood . . . for students and scholars of both humanities and social sciences that are interested in family history, gender, fatherhood, and masculinities this is a must-read book.” —Jørgen Lorentzen, Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Oslo, Norway; Author of Maskulinitet: blikk på mannen gjennom litteratur og film and Co-Editor of Män i Norden ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-01-01,Kathleen McDonald,Americanization of History: Conflation of Time and Culture in Film and Television,Hardback,978-1-4438-2579-5,44.99,"This collection of essays searches for how history and literature translate into filmic texts that then reflect the time and place of the translation. Major motion pictures as well as television movies and series are the sites of this exploration. The opening essay surveys what films tell us it means to be set in a medieval time, while the second looks at one of the most powerful movie studios since the earliest days of movie-making, Walt Disney Studios. The second section investigates classic Americana by delving specifically into the hegemonic power of Walt Disney Studios, by considering the union between the American pastime of baseball and the great white way of Broadway, and by discovering the constantly morphing relationship of the icons of the Wild West. Section three looks at characters living outside of roles considered socially appropriate in their world: vampire slayers, mobsters, and those with multiple personalities. The fourth section studies how present-day mores of power and beauty control revisions of historically-based stories through issues of vengeance, race, sexuality, and the notion of beauty itself. The final section takes up the question of what it means to historicize the present moment, and analyzes the current period via a very popular and long-running show’s depiction of sexuality as accepted or rejected within a paradigm that appears not merely to tolerate, but actively to promote, deviance. The last essay questions the very concepts of time and history themselves. The articles do not reach one conclusion regarding this topic, but instead provide a variety of perspectives which help to theorize the issue for the discerning reader. ","“The essays collected here offer important new perspectives on the appropriation of history in contemporary media. The contributors skillfully explore recent reshapings of historical narratives in cultural artifacts imbued with American assumptions about gender, nostalgia, ethnicity, and war. The result is a fascinating, disturbing assessment of the state of historical knowledge in today’s mass audiences.” —Christopher Morris, Author of The Hanging Figure: On Suspense and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock (2002) “Most educated Americans today understand, and perhaps bemoan, that our nation grasps its own history often through its literature and popular culture. This new anthology, adroitly edited by Kathleen McDonald, helps its mainly academic audience to better understand, and thus to better communicate to its students, just how popular heroes like Mad Men’s ‘Don Draper’ flee society in the footsteps of ‘Huck Finn;’ how adventurous young women like Vampire Slaying ‘Buffy,’ in the mode of Richardson’s ‘Pamela,’ are rendered impotent by the realization of sexual desire; and, overall, how films that are set in earlier, more peaceful and happy times (Take Me Out to the Ball Game) actually more pointedly critique the conflicted eras in which they are made.” —Terry Barr, Professor of English and Director of the Media Studies Program, Presbyterian College, South Carolina, USA “This collection transcends familiar notions of ‘fidelity’ to ask profoundly important questions about Hollywood’s frequently spurious representations of history. Even when the authors’ interpretations seem debatable, their insights are invariably provocative and enlightening. Scholars, students, and casual movie buffs alike will find Americanization of History a compelling read.” —Joseph P. Moser, Professor of English and Film Studies, Fitchburg State University, Massachusetts, USA ""Kathleen Mcdonald's collection offers a rich study of the refraction of history through popular film and television. The Americanization of History gives thoughtful answers to worthwhile questions."" Rhonda V. Wilcox, Norwhich University, November 2010 ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-01-01,Josep M. Armengol,Men in Color: Racialized Masculinities in U.S. Literature and Cinema,Hardback,978-1-4438-2630-3,34.99,"Comprising seven different chapters, the collection Men in Color attempts to analyze, and revisit, the representation of ethnic masculinities, both white and non-white, in and through contemporary U.S. literature and cinema. If most of the existing studies on masculinity and race have centered on one specific model of racialized masculinities, Men in Color attempts to provide an introductory perspective on different racialized masculinities simultaneously, including African American, Asian American, Chicano, Arab American, and also white masculinity, which is analyzed as another ethnic and gendered construct, rather than as a paradigm of normalcy and “universality.” By exploring several ethnic masculinities in relation to each other, the present volume aims to highlight both the differences and the similarities between different patterns of masculinity, showing how, even as gender is inflected by race, certain aspects or features of masculinity remain unchanged across the ethnic board. Ultimately, the volume as a whole illustrates both the changing nature of masculinities as well as the recurrence of certain stereotypes, such as the hypersexualization and/or the feminization of ethnic males, which recur in and across several ethnicities. The constant tension and intersection between gender and race is the subject of this book, which hopes to contribute some notes and reflections on ethnic masculinities to the much more complex and larger discussion about gender and racial identities in our increasingly multicultural and globalized 21st-century world. ","“With his keen eye for diversity, texture and nuance, Josep Armengol has assembled here a rich selection of essays on contemporary depictions of American masculinities, white and non-white, in literature, film and other cultural media. Men in Color provides an invaluable resource for reflecting on the differences and the similarities between apparently very distinct patterns of masculinity, highlighting the perennial tension between gender, race and ethnicity in men’s battle for manhood.” —Lynne Segal, Birkbeck College, University of London; Author of Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men “This is just the kind of collection we need in gender studies these days: each chapter contains a close reading of particular authors or texts, but each is so carefully grounded in gender studies theory that the collection adds up to a whole far greater than the sum of its parts. Wise and judicious editing creates a coherent whole out of these disparate strands.” —Michael Kimmel, Editor of Men and Masculinities ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-02-01,Matthew Hill,"Law, Morality, and Abolitionism: Francis Wayland and Antislavery in America",Hardback,978-1-4438-2677-8,39.99,"In the 1830s the abolitionist movement in the United States refashioned itself under new leadership which was determined to bring slavery to an immediate end. Too often written off by northern and southern opinion-makers alike as fanatics who threatened the social and economic order in America, they struggled in the face of both secular and religious defenders of the institution of slavery. Into this fray stepped Francis Wayland (1796–1865), a leading educator, noted author of textbooks on moral philosophy and economics, and longtime president of Brown University. Initially a moderate on slavery, Wayland with near equal fervor both denounced slavery as sinful and yet countenanced caution in respecting the laws that protected the institution. Like so many of his generation, the flow of events moved him toward Unionism and forced him to confront the logic of his own moral arguments. If slavery was indeed a violation of natural rights, how then could he not act on behalf of those who could not speak for themselves? This work explores his journey. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-02-01,Cal Clark ,"The Changing Dynamics of the Relations among China, Taiwan, and the United States",Hardback,978-1-4438-2681-5,39.99,"Ever since Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang evacuated to Taiwan at the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, China and Taiwan have been divided by a fundamental and irreconcilable sovereignty dispute over Taiwan’s international status. In addition, the United States has played a central role in the rivalry between Beijing and Taipei. Despite the immutable nature of this sovereignty dispute between China and Taiwan, the triangular relations among Beijing, Taipei, and Washington have changed quite considerably over time. Over the last three decades, for example, relations in the Taiwan Strait were fairly tranquil during the 1980s and early 1990s, became much tenser from 1995 to 2008, and then reverted to amicable relations among China, Taiwan, and the United States after the election of a new Taiwanese President in 2008. This book seeks to understand and analyze the relations among China, Taiwan, and the United States in the early twenty-first century. In particular, it explores what causes change in the relations among Beijing, Taipei, and Washington and how stable the new era is likely to be. Consequently, special emphasis is placed on the factors promoting change or stability in the interactions among these three countries and upon the policy choices facing their governments. The major topics include the dynamics of the “strategic triangle” that defines cross-Strait relations (Chapters 2 to 4 and 8), the domestic politics and policies of Taiwan and China (Chapters 3 to 8), and the growing economic integration across the Taiwan Strait (Chapters 9 to 12). Overall, the future of this trilateral relationship appears to be fairly open-ended. Despite the current rapprochement, the ultimate goals of China and Taiwan remain incompatible; cross-Strait relations remain a viciously polarizing issue in Taiwan’s domestic politics; and there is profound scholarly disagreement over the broader implications of the growing economic ties across the Strait. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-03-01,Benjamin Mark Allen,"Captivity, Past and Present: A Compendium of Observations and Interpretations",Hardback,978-1-4438-2690-7,34.99,"Captivity, Past and Present is a compilation of historical, literary, and sociological analyses of tales of human bondage from the early modern era to more recent times. Beginning with a study of 16th-century Spanish captivity sagas that emanated from America, the essays go on to examine the 17th-century Puritan narrative of Mary Rowlandson, the slave narrative of Olaudah Equiano, and concludes with a study of incarcerated African-American mothers in the United States. Also included is an original captivity narrative that relates the 19th-century ordeal of Manuel Ramirez Martinez, who was captured by Comanche Indians in Texas. The studies originated in a conference hosted by the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Association in 2010. Contributors are Franklin Hillson, Jacquelynn Kleist, Jacob Massine, Dahia Messara, Julia Metzger-Traber, Alfonso Uribe and Joel Uribe. ","“By assessing historical, political, social, and psychological dimensions of captivity experiences from colonial Spanish and British North America to the present, this multidisciplinary study explores complexities in this rich if darker side of the frontiers where disparate cultures met. Revealed are the rituals, thought processes, and cycles common to captivity narratives that students of social history in general and borderlands in particular will find compelling and worth a second look.” —William B. Carter, author of Indian Alliances and the Spanish in the Southwest, 750–1750 “A timely collection of well-researched articles that covers origins, classical texts, and contemporary experiences—even a first printing of an original captivity narrative is included. . . . A meaningful contribution to the field of study!” —Professor Sämi Ludwig (UHA Mulhouse, France), author of Cognitive Realism: The Pragmatist Paradigm in American Literary Realism ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-03-01,Robert D. Morritt,The Lure of Olde Arizona,Hardback,978-1-4438-2705-8,44.99,"This book affords the reader an in-depth history of Arizona from the Paleographical era up until Statehood. The author has recorded music in Arizona and is a specialist on the advent of the recording industry from its inception in Arizona during the 1950s and 60s. The book examines the early ‘roots’ of the indigenous people, together with contemporary accounts of early settlers. The author hopes that the reader will derive as much satisfaction from reading this book as he did compiling it! ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-03-01,Robert D. Morritt,The Lure of Texas,Hardback,978-1-4438-2713-3,49.99,"This book affords the reader an in-depth history of Texas from the earliest Paleographical era, providing details of the occupation of Texas by Spain, France and Mexico, and gives the reader contemporary accounts of battles and incursions leading up to the Battle of the Alamo and to the establishment of Statehood. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-04-01,Paul Benedict Grant and Katherine Ashley,Carver Across the Curriculum: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Teaching the Fiction and Poetry of Raymond Carver,Hardback,978-1-4438-2510-8,34.99,"Raymond Carver’s canonical status is secure: his short stories appear regularly in all of the major literary anthologies, and his fiction and poetry are taught at universities around the world. Despite this, there are few instructional aids to teaching Carver's work at university level, and none that take into account the interdisciplinary nature of many modern university courses. Carver Across the Curriculum addresses these needs. Drawing on the experiences and expertise of a group of international scholars, it presents a variety of innovative, interdisciplinary approaches to teaching Carver’s work at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The chapters cover a wide range of disciplines, including music, creative writing, translation, humor studies, food studies, the medical humanities, and the visual and performing arts. As such, the collection serves as a guide and a source of inspiration to instructors, and offers readers new insights into Carver’s fiction and poetry. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-04-01,"Christa Buschendorf, Astrid Franke and Johannes Voelz",Civilizing and Decivilizing Processes: Figurational Approaches to American Culture,Hardback,978-1-4438-2728-7,44.99,"This volume collects new articles that explore the theoretical framework of figurational or relational sociology as represented by Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu with regard to its relevance to American history, culture, and literature. The emphasis is put on Elias’s theory of the “civilizing process” and the question in how far his study of the European process of state formation and the correlative psycho-social changes is relevant to the analysis of the development of the American nation-state and the habitus of Americans. Leading scholars from the field of figurational sociology team up with an international cast of renowned Americanists to shed new light on a variety of issues from the domains of social theory, cultural history, and literary criticism. With Elias as a guide, drinking and democracy in the early republic, nineteenth-century Indian boarding schools, the fear of slave insurrections, and the modern-day black ghetto appear as steps in an open-ended and non-teleological civilizing process that weaves together changes in habitus and social structure. Without stumbling into the pitfalls of an ideology of “American exceptionalism,” the figurational approach to American studies allows the contributors of this pioneering collection to give new answers to the tenacious question of the United States’ peculiar characteristics. Adapting Elias’s analyses to US-American conditions, the authors provide fresh impulses for theorizing civilizing and decivilizing processes, thus transforming the field of both American studies and figurational sociology. The contributors are Jesse F. Battan, Christa Buschendorf, Rachel Hope Cleves, Winfried Fluck, Astrid Franke, Mary O. Furner, Günter Leypoldt, Stephen Mennell, Ruxandra Rădulescu, Kirsten Twelbeck, Johannes Voelz, Loïc Wacquant, and Cas Wouters. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-04-01,Silvia Pilar Castro-Borrego,The Search for Wholeness and Diaspora Literacy in Contemporary African American Literature,Hardback,978-1-4438-2837-6,39.99,"This volume has as a cohesive argument the exploration of the different manifestations of the search for wholeness and spirituality in the writings of contemporary African American women writers, covering different literary genres such as fiction (both novels and short stories), drama and poetry. Together with the issue of spirituality, the African American search for wholeness is analyzed as a source of creativity and agency. As expressed in the contemporary literature of black women writers, starting in the 1980s, the search for wholeness reflects a beauty realized through the healing of the spirit and the body, and is a process that takes on dimensions of reconciling the past and the present, the mythical and the real, the spiritual and the physical—all in the context of an emerging world view that welcomes synthesis and expects both synthesis and generative contradictions. The book will be a valuable collection for scholars of African American literature, comparative American Ethnic literature, American literature, and spirituality, as well as women’s studies. In addition, it will be an important text for both undergraduate and graduate students in those fields. As Professor Johnnella Butler (2006) points out, the African American search for wholeness is tightly linked to the search for freedom and agency. Ever since the 19th century, African American writers have given expression to an African American self which functions in Western civilization simultaneously as a “colonized” other and an assertive “self.” Due to the continuous ordeal of the African Diaspora, this self is caught in between the binaries proposed by the material and the spiritual world, seeking a balance where the person can become whole. The search for wholeness feeds from cultural roots that imply the presence of ancestral spiritualism, rememory, and double consciousness. Contemporary black women writers reflect the metaphor of building spiritual bridges, seeking the possibilities of building a bridge to the archetypal African past that is carried in their memories as a presence that offers sustenance via spiritual reconnection. Their works seek to bridge the gap between the myths and traditions of the past and contemporary African American culture. The texts included in this collection are examples of writing as an exercise of what Vévé Clark calls “Diaspora literacy.” The texts written by contemporary African American women writers explicitly show how to recognize and read the cultural signs left scattered along the road of progress. In this way, material acquisition is achieved along with cultural dispossession, becoming a metaphor for the history of the African in America. The powerful message is that one should not exclude the other. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-04-01,Jill M. O’Mahony and Mícheál Ó hAodha,The Willow’s Whisper: A Transatlantic Compilation of Poetry from Ireland and Native America,Hardback,978-1-4438-2846-8,39.99,"The Willow’s Whisper brings the voices of 35 poets from the Irish and Native American communities together in one compilation. This collection of poems provides an aesthetic commentary on the potential which is beyond and within the everyday. From Gabriel Rosenstock and Biddy Jenkinson to N. Scott Momaday and Karenne Wood, mother-earth comes to life through each sound and syllable, and reawakens our senses to the world at its most beautiful and evocative. This volume will aid us to reconnect with that part of our being which we may have lost touch with; that part of us intimately linked to nature. It will help us see life in every meandering stream as it surges and animates, and in the breeze moving through the branches of a willow—a whisper of hope. ","“One travels hopefully through The Willow’s Whisper. At the heart of this spirited collection rests the perennial wisdom that foreign is native, and native foreign.” —Dr Peter Van de Kamp, Institute of Technology, Tralee, Ireland “A marvellous introduction to the contemporary poetry of the North American Indian, and an inspired get-together with Irish poets writing in Irish—so different in their origins, so similar in their humor and sadness.” —Eoghan Mac Aogáin, Linguistics Institute of Ireland “This thought provoking and imaginative anthology brings poems and poets from diverse sociolinguistic and cultural traditions together into dialogue. Central yet marginalized within their respective discourses, the genus of this anthology is to change the dominant focus. By pairing these ‘non-canonical’ texts, this anthology opens new vistas, and makes new connections amplifying human and cultural concerns all too often lost in the official Anglo-American literary and cultural canon.” —Dr Brian Ó Conchubhair, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-08-01,Laura Mattoon D’Amore,Bound by Love: Familial Bonding in Film and Television since 1950,Hardback,978-1-4438-2985-4,39.99,"What does it mean to be bound by love? Sometimes, the bonds of love supply bliss, and sometimes they demand sacrifice. Sometimes, experiencing love saves people, and sometimes it kills them. Being bound by love often engenders moral responsibility; in other cases, it enslaves and imprisons the soul. American mythologies—especially those presented in film and television—perpetuate love as the central narrative of one’s life; the search for a connection forged by love permeates every facet of human existence, from our desire to be accepted, or our longing to be needed, to our fury at being rejected. Sometimes love is the stuff of happiness, fulfilling in every regard. But there are also times when love makes us do things we should not do; sometimes it turns us into people we do not want to become. The commonality between love that satisfies and love that destroys is the bond between people who open themselves to the vulnerability of love. Examination of the theme of familial bonds in film and television explores how the process of forming and maintaining those bonds complicates, revises, and reproduces ideas about love. The chapters in this book explore how the nature of bonds and familial responsibility inform a popular cultural dialogue about the changing nature of the American family over the past sixty years. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-09-01,"Nur Bilge Criss, Selçuk Esenbel, Tony Greenwood and Louis Mazzari","American Turkish Encounters: Politics and Culture, 1830-1989",Hardback,978-1-4438-3205-2,49.99,"Turkey and the United States have been critically important to each other since the beginning of the Cold War. The history of Turkish-American relations includes not only strategic, but also political, social, cultural and intellectual dimensions. While critical to understanding Turkish-American relations, these dimensions rarely surface in today’s discourse, which reduces bilateral relations to issues currently being contested. In reality, the encounter between East and West embodied in Turkish-American interactions ranges from the official and diplomatic, to unofficial and informal exchanges at the social and individual level; while often compatible and friendly, such interactions occasionally have been less so. Authors from both countries developed a variety of perspectives on their interactions through original research that will enable both specialists and general readers to appreciate its many facets. Most scholarly works on the two nations have been limited to the analysis of US-Turkish relations in the context of Cold War politics. The editors intend that this volume will begin to fill a serious gap and encourage others to study American-Turkish relations from as many aspects as possible. This book shows that when seen in a historical framework, the American Turkish encounter took place beyond the level of formal political and military ties during the Cold War period and has enduringly interacted at the level of educational, social, and cultural realms. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-09-01,Zsófia Anna Tóth,Merry Murderers: The Farcical (Re)Figuration of the Femme Fatale in Maurine Dallas Watkins’ Chicago (1927) and its Various Adaptations,Hardback,978-1-4438-3171-0,39.99,"This book explores the different trends and the various changes in the representational history of femmes fatales within twentieth century American culture. While providing precedents, discussing the Western cultural history of this iconic female figure, as well as presenting the cultural and theoretical debates surrounding ‘her,’ the major focus lies in Maurine Dallas Watkins’s story entitled Chicago and how its diachronic and transmedial revivals contributed to this debate and what kind of an interpretation it provided of the lethal woman. Through a cultural, historical, literary and cinematic excavation this book argues that the story of Chicago produces a unique kind of deathly woman figure: the farcical femme fatale by combining the traditionally tragic aspects with comic modes of discourse and (re)presentation. In addition to the theorization of the femme fatale within Western culture, the discussion of the comic as well as various comic genres and comic strategies of representation, Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnival and the carnivalesque is discussed in great detail – with an emphasis on scapegoating – as well as Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity and Joan Riviere’s womanly masquerade in order to understand how the farcical femmes fatales of Chicago manage to get away with their sins and crimes. Additionally, the Vice of sixteenth century drama as well as the figure of the homme fatale are also taken under scrutiny since it is argued that, in the various versions of Chicago, we encounter farcical femmes fatales who are the minions of a modern(ized) Vice figure, and all their comic-grotesque performances and masquerades take place in the heterotopic space of the carnival. While also examining their historical and cultural contexts, the different versions of Chicago are investigated one by one starting from the original Chicago Tribune articles and ending in the 2002 film adaptation. This book reveals what strategies can be employed to justify the modification of the traditionally tragic scenario of the femme fatale. It is a scholarly work that is informative, thorough as well as entertaining. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-09-01,Danielle A. Hidalgo and Kristen Barber,Narrating the Storm: Sociological Stories of Hurricane Katrina,Paperback,978-1-4438-3200-7,24.99,"For those interested in learning more about the personal impact of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, Narrating the Storm serves as an essential read. This important and timeless volume is a compilation of sixteen narratives that address the experiences of Gulf Coast residents, faculty, and graduate students who were caught up in the largest (not so) natural disaster in United States history. Each contributor deploys storytelling sociology as a methodological approach in order to illustrate how “personal” experiences with disaster are not so personal, but rather reflect and are informed by larger social phenomena related to issues including race, class, gender, age, bureaucracy, risk, collective memory, the blasé, and more. The narratives in this volume exemplify how inequality and injustice are unveiled, exacerbated, and created by the occurrence of disaster; and reveal the sociological in everyday and not-so-everyday experiences. ","“Before we are done with it, hundreds of books and thousands of articles will be written about that set of events we have come to call Katrina. But none of them will be anything like this remarkable collection of memoirs. The authors gathered here all know how to spin a tale and how to do so with a rich sociological sensibility. But, far more to the point, they all have gripping stories to tell.” – Kai Erikson, author of A New Species of Trouble: The Human Experience of Modern Disasters “. . . Narrating the Storm is must reading for anyone interested in the Hurricane Katrina disaster and its aftermath. Emotionally evocative, riveting at times, this engaging collection of original essays is replete with sociological insight. The book is an important contribution, as well, to the genre of storytelling sociology.” – Ronald J. Berger, author of Storytelling Sociology: Narrative as Social Inquiry “The stories told by these individuals provide compelling applications and examples of sociological concepts and theories that serve to stimulate our sociological imaginations. Narrating the Storm is an important contribution to society’s efforts to better understand this latest American tragedy unleashed by Katrina.” – Duane A. Gill, editor of Voices of Katrina, the Journal of Public Management and Social Policy “The authors . . . give us thoughtful, personal, often emotional narratives as well as clear analytical insight on a wide range of issues . . . Narrating the Storm humanizes the disaster with its honest stories and aptly uses theoretical tools to place the stories in a larger sociological context. This is a unique and engaging book.” – Alice Fothergill, author of Heads Above Water: Gender, Class, and Family in the Grand Forks Flood ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-10-01,Paul D. Reich and Maurice J. O’Sullivan,Florida Studies: Proceedings of the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Florida College English Association,Hardback,978-1-4438-3275-5,39.99,"This volume contains a variety of essays about Florida literature and history by scholars from across the state representing every kind of institution of higher learning, from community colleges to small liberal arts institutions to large universities. The first section, Pedagogy, explores the challenges facing Florida teachers at both the high school and undergraduate levels. The essays in Old Florida take on a myriad of texts that provide evaluations of Florida and its culture from the 1540s through the 1950s and include evaluations of Zora Neale Hurston, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Pat Frank. The final section, Contemporary Florida, continues to identify the state’s place within larger literary, cultural, and political traditions. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-10-01,Michael Brody and Lawrence Rubin,Messages: Self Help Through Popular Culture,Hardback,978-1-4438-3278-6,19.99,"Using the authors’ clinical practices and their teaching experiences, along with a series of quotes from movies, TV, advertising and music, this book will help the reader navigate real-world issues. For instance, “Show me the money,” from Jerry Maguire, offers sound financial advice, and “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” from Gone with the Wind, provides insight about love and loss. These references from popular culture help clarify and instruct; they also explain that the prevalence of images, sounds, and words that surround us have something to offer. Indeed, the book allows the authors to come from behind their couches and give direct practical advice, as well as information about ourselves, from the everyday echoes of popular culture. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/popular-culture-meets-psychology/200907/self-help-through-popular-culture-i-money ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-10-01,John R. Leo and Marek Paryz,"Projecting Words, Writing Images: Intersections of the Textual and the Visual in American Cultural Practices",Hardback,978-1-4438-3293-9,44.99,"This compilation of essays by 20 scholars trained in comparative literatures, art history, critical theory, and American cultural studies further explores and expands the spirited and energetic field of visual cultural studies and its cognate or supplemental projects of “visual practices” and “visual literacy.” Their topics and perspectives engage contemporary re-theorizations of “text,” of “word” and “image,” while their alignments, ruptures, slippages and aporias fall across a range of media practices and institutions. These include photography and exhibition, film, television, entertainment, journalism, poetry and literature as visual and spectacular performances, and graphic narratives, but also their discursive intersections with “race” and ethnicity, their conjugations of gender, their tense and constitutive relations within multiple public spheres and (post)modernities. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-10-01,Shirley A. Stave and Justine Tally,Toni Morrison’s A Mercy: Critical Approaches,Hardback,978-1-4438-3300-4,34.99,"Toni Morrison’s ninth novel, A Mercy, has been received with much acclaim by both the critical and lay reading public. Hailed as her best novel after the award-winning Beloved, most critics to date have concentrated on its setting in the late seventeenth century, a time in which, according to the author herself, slavery was “pre-racial,” a time before the “Terrible Transformation” irrevocably linked slavery to skin-color or “race.” Though a slender, easy to read novel, A Mercy is in fact a richly-layered text, full of multiple meanings and possibilities, a work of art that has only just begun to be “mined” for its critical import. The present volume is the first to deal with these possibilities, presenting a variety of critical approaches that include narrative theory, the eco-critical, the geographical, the allegorical, the Miltonian, the feminist, the metaphorical, and the Lacanian. As such, not only is it conceived to enrich the work of Morrison scholars and students, but also to illuminate the use of critical theory in elucidating a complex literary text. A Mercy clamors for close reading and thoughtful interrogation and promises to reward the perceptive reader. ","“This volume presents a series of bold interrogations of Morrison’s ninth novel, which is both her shortest and in many ways her most enigmatic. Combining familiar approaches to Morrison with a range of innovative readings, the essays offer a perceptive and penetrating study of one of Morrison’s most significant texts.” – Prof. Marc Conner, Author of The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable (2000) and Co-author with Wm. R. Nash of Charles Johnson: The Novelist as Philosopher (2007) “The multiple perspectives found here – ecocritical, feminist, intertextual, psychoanalytic – yield fascinating and original insights into diverse aspects of Morrison’s text: orphanhood as metaphor of the African American experience, bodies of water as reflections of African diasporic history, the American wilderness as mirror of the ego, and Morrison’s rewriting of American myths of origin. The collection will be essential reading not only for readers of Morrison’s work, but for students of slavery and of the American colonial environment.” – Jean Wyatt, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies Occidental College; Author of Risking Difference: Identification, Race, and Community in Contemporary Fiction and Feminism (2004) and Reconstructing Desire: The Role of the Unconscious in Women's Reading and Writing (1992) ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-11-01,Mondher Bellalah and Omar Masood,6th International Finance Conference on Financial Crisis and Governance,Hardback,978-1-4438-3308-0,74.99,"Financial markets, the banking system and real estate, commodity and energy markets are experiencing since 2007 higher integration, more volatility, several shocks and more coordination is needed between G20 and market authorities. Regulators, banking supervision and Politicians are worried about economic growth and financial crisis. This book covers at least seven aspects related to financial economic issues. The first covers risk assessment, corporate governance and value creation through an appropriate risk management system. The second covers international investments, markets correlation, institutional holdings and markets reactions during crisis. The third part is devoted to empirical and quantitative analysis of the observed economics and finance issues. The fourth part is devoted to the role of debt in financial crisis and its impact on financial markets and the world economy. The fifth part is devoted to debt policy, free cash flows and the structure of governance. The sixth part deals with Management Control and the importance of communication. The last part covers Islamic finance as an alternative to conventional finance for the debt solution, the importance of the energy sector and the role of financial innovations. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-11-01,Marija Knežević and Aleksandra Nikčević Batrićević,The Face of the Other in Anglo-American Literature,Hardback,978-1-4438-3351-6,39.99,"If we have established that our approach to the phenomena that are other to us is always a matter of semiosis, and that even in an attempt to naturalize phenomenology, like the one made by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who points to the corporeity of consciousness as much as an intentionality of the body, it appears that our most negligible movements present our cultural being or habituality (cf. Iris Young, Throwing Like a Girl, 1990, 2005). However, many thinkers have claimed (for example, the novelist D. H. Lawrence or philosopher Luce Iragary) that we know by touch and intuition. The papers collected in this book examine our approach to these issues in an essentially post-theory world, particularly enquiring if twentieth century theory has left us clear directions of where we are supposed to be looking for new ways of understanding and representing the phenomenological. The way the Other exists in the consciousness that, as Hegel said, always pursues its death, becomes especially interesting in the context of the development of Anglo-American studies in the post-postmodern world which sees the West as a changeable cultural (and geographical) concept that incorporates a multiplicity of others. Yet, at the same time, a number of contemporary Anglo-American writers insists on the prolonged effects of colonialism in the modern world, in which outbursts of violence and hatred aimed at the Other prove that the modern world still cannot approach the Other without bigotry. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-02-01,Benjamin Mark Allen and Dahia Messara,The Captivity Narrative: Enduring Shackles and Emancipating Language of Subjectivity,Hardback,978-1-4438-3525-1,34.99,"The Captivity Narrative offers a collection of scholarly treatises that assess the phenomenon of captivity and the nuanced methods captives have used to express their psychological duress and the manner in which they coped with bondage and its aftermath. The essays reflect a multidisciplinary interest in the subject by offering historical, literary, and philosophical analyses. Topics include 17th-century captivity in Spanish Texas and Puritan New England, 19th-century slavery, Indian captivity in works of fiction, and the poetry, literature, and narratives of prisoners in the United States and England from the 19th to 21st century. The studies originated in a conference hosted in San Antonio, Texas (2011) by the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Association. Contributors include Anne Babson, Jennifer Oakes Curtis, Lanta Davis, Steven Gambrel, Anne Matthews, Alan Smith and Elisabeth Ziemba. ","“This welcome collection of essays showcases the exciting work that has come out of the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Association’s focus groups on captivity narratives. It illuminates important moments in the development of this dynamic genre, from accounts of early contact to 19th-century fictional captivities to contemporary prison writings, offering a diverse array of approaches both to captivity itself and to its literary legacies.” – Jennifer S. Tuttle, University of New England; Co-editor of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers “Captivity studies scholars will find much to admire and engage with in The Captivity Narrative: Enduring Shackles and Emancipating Language of Subjectivity. The present volume organizes a rich array of scholarship analyzing accounts from the 16th century to the present day, from the history of the Talon children, members of the failed French colony established by LaSalle, to 19th-century slave narratives, to oral storytelling by contemporary imprisoned Englishmen. This multidisciplinary, transnational anthology considers captivity novels and poetry; two scholars use primary documents to reveal captivity accounts hidden in the archives. The anthology explores the relation of this protean genre to sensationalist and sentimental literature, as well as the ways in which these texts reveal the effects of trauma, displacement, redemption, and reconciliation on survivors. These essays will compel researchers in literature, sociology, history, cultural studies, psychology, and criminal justice, as well as gender, race, and ethnic studies.” – Jeanne Holland, Associate Professor of English and author, University of Wyoming ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-02-01,Jill M. O’Mahony and Mícheál Ó hAodha,The Willow’s Whisper: A Transatlantic Compilation of Poetry from Ireland and Native America,Paperback,978-1-4438-3735-4,24.99,"The Willow’s Whisper brings the voices of 35 poets from the Irish and Native American communities together in one compilation. This collection of poems provides an aesthetic commentary on the potential which is beyond and within the everyday. From Gabriel Rosenstock and Biddy Jenkinson to N. Scott Momaday and Karenne Wood, mother-earth comes to life through each sound and syllable, and reawakens our senses to the world at its most beautiful and evocative. This volume will aid us to reconnect with that part of our being which we may have lost touch with; that part of us intimately linked to nature. It will help us see life in every meandering stream as it surges and animates, and in the breeze moving through the branches of a willow—a whisper of hope. ","“One travels hopefully through The Willow’s Whisper. At the heart of this spirited collection rests the perennial wisdom that foreign is native, and native foreign.” —Dr Peter Van de Kamp, Institute of Technology, Tralee, Ireland “A marvellous introduction to the contemporary poetry of the North American Indian, and an inspired get-together with Irish poets writing in Irish—so different in their origins, so similar in their humor and sadness.” —Eoghan Mac Aogáin, Linguistics Institute of Ireland “This thought provoking and imaginative anthology brings poems and poets from diverse sociolinguistic and cultural traditions together into dialogue. Central yet marginalized within their respective discourses, the genus of this anthology is to change the dominant focus. By pairing these ‘non-canonical’ texts, this anthology opens new vistas, and makes new connections amplifying human and cultural concerns all too often lost in the official Anglo-American literary and cultural canon.” —Dr Brian Ó Conchubhair, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-03-01,Melvin B. Rahming,"Critical Essays on Barack Obama: Re-affirming the Hope, Re-vitalizing the Dream",Hardback,978-1-4438-3621-0,44.99,"This collection of critical essays explores the life and writings of President Barack Obama. The individual essays, written by a diverse body of scholars, examine specific facets of Obama’s career – from personal, communal, national and international reactions to his presidential election; to his controversial contributions to the global conversation about race; his impact on popular culture and race relations; his literary, political and philosophical visions; his attitude toward the American constitution; his enactment of new legislation; to the manner in which he attempts to influence American public policy; and to the implications his presidency holds for Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. Ranging far beyond the presentation of personal opinions about the Obama Administration, these essays offer scholarly perspectives on Obama’s two books, and on his multidimensional efforts to remove the obstacles to equality of opportunity in the United States. They also explore Obama’s potential for re-shaping the American social and cultural terrain and, by extension, for re-vitalizing the American Dream. This book should be of interest to scholars of political science, literature, history, philosophy, religion and psycho-culture as well as to the general reading public. "," “The driving impulse behind the book is the desire to document and interrogate the topography of the Obama energy as it ignites the imagination of the world across race, class and generations to force into creative being a political paradigm which celebrates the beauty of the human spirit and signals the possibility of the birth of a post-racial ethos. This is an excellent collection of responses to a momentous and game-changing historical event. The book tackles issues such as the interconnectedness of Obama’s artistic and political visions, the nature of his personal, ancestral and collective narratives as he crafts his distinctive yet representational prosthetic memory; the expectation of Obama as a trigger for post-racial America where race would cease to be the normative definition of individuals and groups; and the systemic and cultural structures which must be addressed before a re-engineered post-racial America can become a reality. Some of the essays are erudite, some polemical, some reflective or data-driven and almost all witty, humorous and elegantly written. While a good number of the essays are ecstatic about the Obama victory, however, what emerges as a dominant impulse is the fact that, on the balance, he is an omen of, more than a trigger for, change.” – Funso Aiyejina, PhD, Professor and Dean, Faculty of Humanities and Education, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago “In this collection of essays, the authors do not shrink from the central issue of race that underlies Obama’s presidency, nor do they shrink, as the editor correctly argues, from the implicit or explicit spiritual significance that it contains. In a series of provocative chapters the diverse authors map, each in his own fashion, the outlines of certain essential issues evoked by Obama’s unexpected election. Many of the essays ably illustrate the conflicts between the widely recognized thesis of race as a social construction versus it’s social reality; the cruel realities of creating a personal identity in a world still dominated by an essentializing discourse on race; and the crucial role of Obama as a unique paradigm in American politics – a theme, as the editor recognizes, that cannot be reduced to a purely materialist analysis. Detailed readings of historical influences such as the griot tradition in African cultures or the vatic tendencies of slave narratives help one to understand the historical, ideological and ultimately spiritual baggage that Obama brings to his historically novel role. Others are particularly useful in describing the sociological scope of the extremely complex concatenation of historical and political realities that resulted in Obama’s victory. On the whole the collection’s broad range of methodological strategies provides a welcome antidote to the mass of more narrowly pragmatic political analyses of the subject and fills in an underdeveloped area in Obama Studies Trajectory.” – Dr Robert Tomlinson, Professor Emeritus, Emory University, Georgia, USA, Former Acting Director of African and African American Studies ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-03-01,Vanessa K. Valdés,The Future is Now: A New Look at African Diaspora Studies,Hardback,978-1-4438-3638-8,39.99,"The Future is Now: A New Look at African Diaspora Studies is an exciting collection of essays representative of new voices in this ever-expanding field. Writing in English, Spanish, French, and Haitian Creole, the volume’s contributors look at the fields of art, literature, film, and music. From the Hispanophone, Francophone, and Anglophone Caribbean to the United States and Europe, the scholars here interrogate themes of memory, power, gender, identity, race, and religion. In so doing, they uncover forgotten episodes of history previously lost to hegemonic tellings of the past. Here, readers will find studies on Haitian documentary, Puerto Rican art, Trinidadian calypso, Colombian poetry, the African-American novel, and African photography and collage. The Future Is Now serves as a celebration of the contributions made by peoples of African descent, providing a glimpse at the breadth of cultural offerings to be found throughout the African Diaspora in the Americas and Europe. ","“The merit of The Future is Now: A New Look at African Diaspora Studies is that it takes scholars out of the traditional academic straightjacket, by focusing on more than one discipline, more than one geographic location, and more than one linguistic group. The volume takes a welcome holistic approach to the African diasporic experience.” – Flore Zéphir, PhD, Professor and Chair, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Missouri; Acting Director, Afro-Romance Institute for Languages and Literatures of the African Diaspora “[The Future is Now] will make a valuable contribution to the dialogue on the current thinking and on the future direction of African Diaspora Studies. Regarding the essays themselves, they are thought-provoking, well-researched, and quite appropriate for demonstrating how one pays ‘homage to one’s ancestors’ . . .” – James J. Davis, PhD, Professor and Chair, Department of World Languages and Cultures, Howard University “Dealing with the African Diaspora in the Americas, the essays here are significant in that they expand this important subject beyond its all too common focus on the culture of the United States alone and discuss it in the context of Latin America as well. In an age of unprecedented electronic communication between the peoples of the Americas, the implementation of this kind of hemispheric perspective is both refreshing and productive.” – Earl E. Fitz, PhD, Professor of Spanish, Portuguese, and Comparative Literature, Vanderbilt University ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-05-01,Leslie G. Cecil,New Frontiers in Latin American Borderlands,Hardback,978-1-4438-3765-1,34.99,"Approximately 500 years after the first borderlands were being constructed in Latin America to distinguish the indigenous population from their colonizers, boundaries are still being created in Latin America. Although borders still exist, the reasons for their construction and maintenance in the current global world have expanded. Today, Latin American borders include the traditional political borders, as well as more non-traditional borders reflected in art, gender, and social programs. Because borders and the concept of borders are constantly changing, the chapters in this edited volume present a reexamination of the more traditionally defined political borders, as well as those that are constructed by the human body, art, and social policy. The chapters naturally separate into four different general topics: 1) traditional transnational borders, 2) borders and the gendered body, 3) borders as depicted in art, and 4) borders and social programs. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-06-01,Edith Bruder and Tudor Parfitt,African Zion: Studies in Black Judaism,Hardback,978-1-4438-3802-3,44.99,"Over the last hundred years, in Africa and the United States, through a variety of religious encounters, some black African societies adopted ― or perhaps rediscovered ―a Judaic religious identity. African Zion grows out of a joined interest in these diversified encounters with Judaism, their common substrata and divergences, their exogenous or endogenous characteristics, the entry or re-entry of these people into the contemporary world as Jews and the necessity of reshaping the standard accounts of their collective experience. In various loci the bonds with Judaism of black Jews were often forged in the harshest circumstances and grew out of experiences of slavery, exile, colonial subjugation, political ethnic conflicts and apartheid. For the African peoples who identify as Jews and with other Jews, identification with biblical Israel assumes symbolical significance. This book presents the way in which the religious identification of African American Jews and African black Jews―“real”, ideal or imaginary, has been represented, conceptualized and reconfigured over the last century or so. These essays grow out of a concern to understand Black encounters with Judaism, Jews and putative Hebrew/Israelite origins and are intended to illuminate their developments in the medley of race, ethnicity, and religion of the African and African American religious experience. They explore and review the major characteristics of the external and internal variables that shaped these group religious identities in Africa and the United States and reflect the geographical and historic mosaic of black Judaism, permeated as it is with different “meanings” both contemporary and historical. ","""'African Zion: Studies in Black Judaism' traces a vast network of black associations with Judaism from across the African continent and beyond, a welcome, multi-discipinary contribution to a long neglected topic."" —Kay Kaufman Shelemay, G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University “Tudor Parfitt and Edith Bruder have gathered a collection of articles that explore the historical, political and racial themes that have influenced Africans and their descendants' understanding of Judaism. The articles range from novel reconstructions of ancient Jewish populations moving into Africa, through the creation of Jewish practices by a variety of African and American groups. This approach puts African Zion at the head of a wide range of engagements with Jewish, African and African American history and religion that includes genetic research, linguistic analysis, textual studies and religious history. It should attract readers from Jewish communities around the world as well as students and scholars of religion and culture generally.” —John Thorton, Professor of History and African American Studies, Boston University, author of Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World and Linda Heywood, Director African American Studies, Boston University ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing