A group biography of five women who played path-breaking roles in the transcendentalist movement

In November 1839, a group of young women in Boston formed a conversation society to answer the great questions of special importance to women: What are we born to do? How shall we do it? The lives and works of the five women who discussed these questions are at the center of Bright Circle, a group biography of remarkable thinkers and artists who played pathbreaking roles in the transcendentalist movement.

Transcendentalism remains the most important literary and philosophical movement to have originated in the United States. Most accounts of it, however, trace its emergence to a group of young intellectuals (primarily Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau) dissatisfied with their religious, literary, and social culture. Yet there is a forgotten history of transcendentalism--a submerged counternarrative--that features a network of fiercely intelligent women who were central to the development of the movement even as they found themselves silenced by their culturally-assigned roles as women.

Bright Circle is intended to reorient our understanding of transcendentalism: to help us see the movement as a far more collaborative and interactive project between women and men than is commonly understood. It recounts the lives of Mary Moody Emerson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Lydia Jackson Emerson, and Margaret Fuller as they developed crucial ideas about the self, nature, and feeling even as they pushed their male counterparts to consider the rights of enslaved people of color and women.

Many ideas once considered original to Emerson and Thoreau are shown to have originated with women who had little opportunity of publicly expressing them. Together, the five women of Bright Circle helped form the foundations of American feminism.

The Literature of Extreme Poverty in the Great Depression uncovers a forgotten side of modernism: the literature of unemployment and poverty in the 1930s, particularly fiction and poetry about people starving on the street or struggling on welfare, people who often don't know where they'll find their next meal or whether they'll find someplace to sleep. They spend the night on park benches or in filthy flophouses, or they trade sex for food and shelter, or they starve. Time itself changes. For the starving poor standing for hours and hours in a breadline, the speed of modern culture slows down.
Parker expands on previous studies of the 1930s by recovering the fiction and poetry of dozens of forgotten writers and reading them together with political cartoons and with underknown writing by such acclaimed or understudied writers as Langston Hughes, Tom Kromer, Dorothy West, and Martha Gellhorn. From an age so immersed in despair and suffering that many writers came to doubt the very idea of literary aesthetics, this book rescues a vast archive of literary analogues to the famous documentary photographs that burned the Depression into American visual memory. It shapes a collective portrait and interpretation of a nearly lost literary history that represents a nation, its crisis, and its literature of crisis from the bottom up rather than from the top down.

The Prosthetic Arts of Moby-Dick offers the first book-length study of how physical disability shapes one of the world's most iconic novels. For generations, readers have viewed Captain Ahab's whalebone leg as a symbol of what he lacks, the limb he lost while fighting the white whale off the coast of Japan. David Haven Blake considers that ivory leg in a historical, medical, and geo-political context. Drawing on extensive archival research, he situates Ahab's prosthesis at the center of the novel's reflections on wounding, embodiment, and the role that Islamic cultures play in American narratives of revenge.

Melville had a lifelong fascination with dismemberment. From the use of assistive devices to the phenomenon of phantom limbs, he keenly imagined the experience of disability on ship. Blake connects the novel's interest in prostheses with its use of Islamic imagery to characterize overwhelming power. In this radically new analysis, he identifies the character Fedallah as the captain's most important prosthesis in piloting the captain to his final battle with Moby Dick. A key to understanding both Ahab and Ishmael, Fedallah emerges as the crutch upon which this novel of dismemberment leans.

Engagingly written and spanning each stage of Melville's career, The Prosthetic Arts of Moby-Dick is an eye-opening meditation on democracy, aggrievement, and the challenges of living in a global age.

Arguing that the well-known cowboy ballad The Streets of Laredo is an early expression of discontent with an encroaching modernity, author José E. Limón draws upon ethnomusicology, folklore, history, contemporary literature, and other sources to provide a deeply contextualized analysis of the song. He explores its place in the imaginative construction of the American West and its role in the interpretation of both Anglo-American and Mexican American identity in the Texas borderlands and beyond.

With the ballad as his point of departure, Limón takes readers on a tour that includes formative experiences from his childhood in Laredo and Corpus Christi; examination of the works of Américo Paredes, Larry McMurtry, and others; and considerations of American popular music, cinema, baseball, and associated socio-cultural phenomena. The result is a complex and intriguing view of Texas and American culture as seen through the lens of a simple cowboy song.

It is my hope, Limón writes in his introduction, that this account of these central figures in Texas history--the ordinary cowboy and this ballad--will prove useful as Texas deals with the current and deeply conflicted phase in its long struggle with modernity. The Streets of Laredo: Texas Modernity and Its Discontents offers readers important new perspectives on how society struggles with, understands, and comes to terms--or fails to come to terms--with the inevitable changes wrought by an evolving culture.

Intersecting Worlds: Colonial Liminality in US Southern and Icelandic Literatures recalibrates readings of US southern and American writers by exploring comparable depictions of race, colonialism, Whiteness, gender, and sexuality in Icelandic literature. This book explores the liminality, ambiguity, and general unease that result when postcolonial theories are applied to both Iceland and the US South. It investigates the parallels and also the limitations to such comparisons with the labels and binaries created to represent colonial dynamics flattening the complex positionings of Iceland and the US South.

Iceland, an independent nation since 1944, has a complex colonial history. As a former dependency of Denmark that endured a US military presence from 1941 to 2006, Iceland's global positioning invites comparisons to formerly colonized spaces. At the same time, Iceland's history and geopolitical location differ from other colonized nations, which were subject to brutal violence and dehumanizing practices. This comparative project investigates Iceland's colonial liminality and draws connections to the colonial ambiguity of the US South, depicted as colonized by the federal government during Reconstruction and the site of the colonization of the Black population through slavery and its later iterations.

Exploring the work of US southern writers, like William Faulkner, Gayl Jones, Jean Toomer, and Carson McCullers, alongside twentieth-century Icelandic novelists, including Halldór Laxness, Svava Jakobsdóttir, Guðbergur Bergsson, and Fríða Áslaug Sigurðardóttir, on both thematic and aesthetic levels reveals much about each region's history and the complexity of colonial dynamics. Intersecting Worlds centers layers of Whiteness in both national and transnational contexts, challenges ideas of Nordic and US southern exceptionalism, and exposes the complex impacts of colonialism in the Global North and the Global South, as depicted in twentieth-century literature.

Hell-Bent for Leather: Sex and Sexuality in the Weird Western builds on the Locus Award finalist Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre. This new collection takes a deep dive into the myriad ways sex and sexuality are imagined in weird western literature, film, television, and video games, paying special attention to portrayals of power and privilege. The contributors explore weird western challenges to assumptions about varied genders and sexualities, drawing our attention to how the western can reinforce existing gender and sexual paradigms or overturn them in delightful, terrifying, or unexpected ways.

Primary texts range from CBS's campy BDSM-inflected steampunk western The Wild Wild West to the Star Wars franchise's popular leather-daddy bounty hunter The Mandalorian, from Ishmael Reed's satirical postmodern western Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down to C Pam Zhang's acclaimed novel How Much of These Hills Is Gold. Chapters engage texts from Australia and Great Britain, classic horror like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the popular video games BioShock Infinite and The Last of Us II, and less well-known texts like Laguna Pueblo-Navajo author A. A. Carr's erotic vampire/monster slayer western Eye Killers.

Kerry Fine is an instructor in the Department of English at Arizona State University. Michael K. Johnson is a professor of English at the University of Maine-Farmington. Rebecca M. Lush is a professor in the Literature and Writing Studies Department and is the Faculty Center director at California State University San Marcos. Sara L. Spurgeon is a professor of English and directs the Literature, Social Justice, and Environment Program at Texas Tech University. Fine, Johnson, Lush, and Spurgeon are the coeditors of Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre (Nebraska, 2020).

Wallace Stegner is an iconic western writer. His works of fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Angle of Repose and Big Rock Candy Mountain, as well as his nonfiction books and essays introduced the beauty and character of the American West to thousands of readers. Wallace Stegner's Unsettled Country assesses his life, work, and legacy in light of contemporary issues and crises. Along with Stegner's achievements, the contributors show how his failures offer equally crucial ways to assess the past, present, and future of the region.

Drawing from history, literature, philosophy, law, geography, and park management, the contributors consider Stegner's racial liberalism and regional vision, his gendered view of the world, his understandings of conservation and the environment, his personal experience of economic collapse and poverty, his yearning for community, and his abiding attachment to the West. Wallace Stegner's Unsettled Country is an even-handed reclamation of Stegner's enduring relevance to anyone concerned about the American West's uncertain future.

This assessment of a major southern writer's work offers a revisionist view of her characters, who in the past twenty-five years of critical attention too often and too easily have been labeled grotesque.

O'Connor's stories and novels are usually considered mere dramatizations of her stated orthodox religious commitments. According to the predominant view, the typical O'Connor work consists of a set of corrupt characters and an authoritative narrator who analyzes their theological errors. When redemption occurs, according to this view, it results from forces outside the character and against that character's will.

Although such a reading adequately describes a few works, it misunderstands O'Connor's general handling of narration and of characterization. Marshall Bruce Gentry proposes new positions on O'Connor's narration and on the role of the grotesque in her characterization. By investigating the nature of religious experience in her works, he concludes that O'Connor's primary interest is redemption achieved by grotesque and unconscious means.

Often in O'Connor's works, redemption becomes a moment of freedom in a continuing process of degradation and reformation. The real focus of O'Connor's fiction is the grotesque path toward redemption. As Gentry points out, by sending themselves toward physical annihilation, her characters typically take control of their redemption.

Once again, we encounter Notley as one the great interlocutors of the world, a dedicated advocate for what is between and beyond definition. --Tess Michaelson, Full Stop

Alice Notley, the author of more than 40 books of poetry, has delivered an expert array of discussions over the last three decades. Telling the Truth as It Comes Up: Selected Talks & Essays 1991-2018 offers a significant contribution to literature, reimagining the possibilities of writing in our time and the complicated business of how and why writers devote their lives to their craft. Whether she is writing about other poets--Ed Dorn, Allen Ginsberg, Homer, bpNichol, Douglas Oliver or William Carlos Williams--noir fiction, the First Gulf War, dreams or giving us insight into her own work, Notley's observations are original, sobering and always memorable. This collection often eschews the typical style of essay or lecture, resisting any categorization, and is consciously disobedient to academic structures in form. The results are thrilling new modes of thinking that may change the ways we read and write.
Alice Notley was born in Bisbee, Arizona, in 1945, and grew up in Needles, California. During the late '60s and early '70s she lived a traveling poet's life before settling on New York's Lower East Side. For 16 years there, she was an important force in the eclectic second generation of the so-called New York School. Notley is the author of more than 40 books of poetry, including At Night the States, the double volume Close to Me and Closer . . . (The Language of Heaven) and Désamère and How Spring Comes, which was a co-winner of the San Francisco Poetry Award. In 1998, Penguin published Mysteries of Small Houses, which was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. In 2015 she was awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize for lifetime achievement in poetry.

William Faulkner in Holly Springs describes places and people in this small Mississippi town and defines how these newly identified individuals and locales affected Faulkner's writings. Author Sally Wolff uncovers new information about Faulkner's sources and examines how the town of Holly Springs, its people, and its culture influenced the Nobel Laureate and the literature he produced. Wolff argues that this information can serve as touchstone sources for some of Faulkner's most renowned fiction, including The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, Intruder in the Dust, and Requiem for a Nun.

Information from various interviews with over twenty current and former citizens of Holly Springs also helps to reveal Faulkner's presence in this small town and the ways in which he drew from and then transformed what he found there into some of the greatest works in American letters. A clearer understanding of Faulkner's sources helps elucidate the breadth of creativity and imagination with which he forged his world-famous literature.

With a foreword by John N. Maclean, son of Norman Maclean

The Writings of Norman Maclean: Seeking Truth amid Tragedy provides the first critical reassessment of this celebrated author's work in more than a decade. In his study, Timothy P. Schilling focuses on Maclean's attempt, in A River Runs through It and Other Stories and Young Men and Fire, to come to grips with the tragic side of human existence. From the 1938 death of his brother Paul to the 1949 deaths of thirteen firefighters in Montana's Mann Gulch wildfire, Maclean is driven by a desire to discover ultimate meaning--the truth--in the face of haunting tragedy. Through careful analysis of all of Maclean's published works, Schilling highlights the audaciousness of Maclean's quest to wrest free an answer from the universe.

Ever open to scientific, literary, philosophical, and theological ways of viewing reality, Maclean found ambiguity, paradoxically, to be an essential tool for probing the truth. Beyond exploring Maclean's use of this tool, Schilling breaks new ground by considering Maclean's invocation of the Transcendentals in A River Runs through It, noting the sly homage Maclean pays to Izaak Walton, examining Maclean's often-neglected Other Stories, assessing Robert Redford's film adaptation of A River Runs through It, and providing the most thorough exploration of Young Men and Fire yet available.

With this book, Schilling offers a current and complete analysis of Maclean--one of the most iconic figures in Western American literature.

Gothic Appalachian Literature examines the ways contemporary Appalachian authors utilize gothic tropes to explore the complex history and contemporary problems of the region, particularly in terms of their representation of economic, environmental, and political concerns. It argues that across Appalachian fiction, the plight of characters to save their homes, land and way of life from the destructive forces of extractive industries brings sharply to bare the histories of colonization and slavery that problematize questions of belonging, ownership and possession.
- Robertson extensively considers contemporary manifestations of the gothic in Appalachian literature, arguing that gothic tropes abound in fiction that focuses on the impacts of extractive industries and the climate crisis that connect this micro-region with other parts of the Global North and Global South where the devastating impacts of extractive industries are also experienced socially, economically and environmentally. Across contemporary Appalachian writing the everyday is haunted by the specter of climate change. As a result, while Appalachian fiction contains an array of horror-fueled texts rife with the regional stereotypes common in the popular imagination, the monstrous in contemporary Appalachian fiction is commonly found in overflowing slurry pits, the nightmarish sight of fracking towers, floods, droughts and forest fires. Gothic Appalachian Literature proposes that Appalachian texts that expose readers to the sites and processes of fossil fuel extraction, and their contribution to the climate crisis, are inherently gothic.
- As Robertson explores both historic and contemporary forms of the gothic she covers a diverse range of voices and perspectives that reflect a complex micro-region where individuals and communities are more richly complex than the reductive stereotypes of Appalachia ever allow. To that end, Robertson engages with contemporary debates about race and LGBTQ+ rights in what she terms a post-Trump moment in Appalachian literature.

In Unhomely Wests Stephen Tatum presents twenty-six essays exploring selected literary, visual art, cinematic, and musical representations of homelessness as a theme, a trope, an affliction, a threat, and a condition of alienation in the late modern and postmodern American West. Arranged in alphabetical order, from Alphabet/Abecedario to Zombieland, Tatum's essays aim to discover how his eclectic selection of texts both produce uncanny literary effects and bear witness to the entangled capitalist, geopolitical, and ecological crises that shape our external world and our unhomely textual worlds.

In keeping with the etymological and conceptual linkage between the unhomely and the uncanny, Tatum's critical meditations focus on both uncanny textual architectures and architecturally unhomely junkspaces of abandonment and ruin, of corporeal displacement, and of cognitive or affective disorientation. And since an emergent unhomely structure of feeling exposes how our lived present is saturated with history's apparitional revenants, this collection of essays--comprising a new lexicon of unhomely Wests--conveys a hauntology underwritten by spectrality as a theme, a trope, an image. Committed to revising the conventional academic text, Unhomely Wests exemplifies Roland Barthes's directive that we consider the alphabetic order as a call to Cut! Resume the story in another way!

The Dirty South examines the shifting significances of the South as a constructed, fantasized region in the American psyche, particularly its frequent association with tropes of dirt that emphasize soil, garbage, trash, grit, litter, mud, swamp water, slime, and pollution. Beginning with iconic works from the 1970s such as Deliverance and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, James A. Crank traces the image of a dirty South into the twenty-first century to explore the social, political, and psychological effects of the region's hold on the imaginations of southerners and nonsoutherners alike.

With a focus on media forms through which southern identity gets articulated and questioned--including horror movies, Swamp Thing comics, and popular music by artists such as Waylon Jennings and OutKast--The Dirty South probes the sustained fascination with southern dirtiness while reflecting on its causes and consequences since the end of the civil rights era. Highlighting the period from 1970 to 2020, during which the South began to represent several new possible identities for the nation as a whole and for the area itself, Crank considers the ways that southerners have used depictions of dirt to create and police boundaries and to contest those boundaries. Each chapter pairs prominent literary or cultural texts from the 1970s with more contemporary works, such as Jordan Peele's film Get Out, which recycle similar investments or, critically, challenge the inherent whiteness of the earlier images.

By historicizing fantasies of the region and connecting them to the first decades of the twenty-first century, The Dirty South reveals that notions about southern dirtiness proliferate not because they lend authenticity or relevancy to the U.S. South, but because they aid so conspicuously in the zombified work of tethering investors (real and imagined) to a graveyard of ideas.

Faulkner the Southerner is the first biography to place the author in the context of his Southern culture and the continuity of Southern letters. Doing so helps prevent glaring misreadings of his fiction. It explores Faulkner's humor, sense of honor, rootedness in place, criticism of the machine culture and racial attitudes. It treats Faulkner the raconteur, successful farmer, sensitive preservationist, conservative, and Southern traditionalist.

Hell-Bent for Leather: Sex and Sexuality in the Weird Western builds on the Locus Award finalist Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre. This new collection takes a deep dive into the myriad ways sex and sexuality are imagined in weird western literature, film, television, and video games, paying special attention to portrayals of power and privilege. The contributors explore weird western challenges to assumptions about varied genders and sexualities, drawing our attention to how the western can reinforce existing gender and sexual paradigms or overturn them in delightful, terrifying, or unexpected ways.

Primary texts range from CBS's campy BDSM-inflected steampunk western The Wild Wild West to the Star Wars franchise's popular leather-daddy bounty hunter The Mandalorian, from Ishmael Reed's satirical postmodern western Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down to C Pam Zhang's acclaimed novel How Much of These Hills Is Gold. Chapters engage texts from Australia and Great Britain, classic horror like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the popular video games BioShock Infinite and The Last of Us II, and less well-known texts like Laguna Pueblo-Navajo author A. A. Carr's erotic vampire/monster slayer western Eye Killers.

Kerry Fine is an instructor in the Department of English at Arizona State University. Michael K. Johnson is a professor of English at the University of Maine-Farmington. Rebecca M. Lush is a professor in the Literature and Writing Studies Department and is the Faculty Center director at California State University San Marcos. Sara L. Spurgeon is a professor of English and directs the Literature, Social Justice, and Environment Program at Texas Tech University. Fine, Johnson, Lush, and Spurgeon are the coeditors of Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre (Nebraska, 2020).

William Faulkner in Holly Springs describes places and people in this small Mississippi town and defines how these newly identified individuals and locales affected Faulkner's writings. Author Sally Wolff uncovers new information about Faulkner's sources and examines how the town of Holly Springs, its people, and its culture influenced the Nobel Laureate and the literature he produced. Wolff argues that this information can serve as touchstone sources for some of Faulkner's most renowned fiction, including The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, Intruder in the Dust, and Requiem for a Nun.

Information from various interviews with over twenty current and former citizens of Holly Springs also helps to reveal Faulkner's presence in this small town and the ways in which he drew from and then transformed what he found there into some of the greatest works in American letters. A clearer understanding of Faulkner's sources helps elucidate the breadth of creativity and imagination with which he forged his world-famous literature.

Dangerous Innocence investigates how prevailing constructions of white masculinity in the U.S. South help feed and reinforce systems of racial inequity. Tracing the rise of the southern outsider in literature and on television from 1960 to 2020, William P. Murray probes white Americans' enduring desire to assert their own blamelessness even though such acts of self-justification facilitate continued violence against historically oppressed populations. Dangerous Innocence courses from popular television such as The Andy Griffith Show and The Waltons through influential fiction by Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and other prominent southern authors--alongside forceful challenges voiced by Black writers including Chester Himes and Ernest Gaines--before turning to works created after the September 11 attacks that reinscribe cultural logics predicated on protecting white innocence and power.

Concluding on a note of praxis, Dangerous Innocence argues that reattaching southern outsiders to a communal identity encourages an honest assessment about what whiteness represents and what it means to belong to a nation steeped in commitments to white supremacy.

Intersecting Worlds: Colonial Liminality in US Southern and Icelandic Literatures recalibrates readings of US southern and American writers by exploring comparable depictions of race, colonialism, Whiteness, gender, and sexuality in Icelandic literature. This book explores the liminality, ambiguity, and general unease that result when postcolonial theories are applied to both Iceland and the US South. It investigates the parallels and also the limitations to such comparisons with the labels and binaries created to represent colonial dynamics flattening the complex positionings of Iceland and the US South.

Iceland, an independent nation since 1944, has a complex colonial history. As a former dependency of Denmark that endured a US military presence from 1941 to 2006, Iceland's global positioning invites comparisons to formerly colonized spaces. At the same time, Iceland's history and geopolitical location differ from other colonized nations, which were subject to brutal violence and dehumanizing practices. This comparative project investigates Iceland's colonial liminality and draws connections to the colonial ambiguity of the US South, depicted as colonized by the federal government during Reconstruction and the site of the colonization of the Black population through slavery and its later iterations.

Exploring the work of US southern writers, like William Faulkner, Gayl Jones, Jean Toomer, and Carson McCullers, alongside twentieth-century Icelandic novelists, including Halldór Laxness, Svava Jakobsdóttir, Guðbergur Bergsson, and Fríða Áslaug Sigurðardóttir, on both thematic and aesthetic levels reveals much about each region's history and the complexity of colonial dynamics. Intersecting Worlds centers layers of Whiteness in both national and transnational contexts, challenges ideas of Nordic and US southern exceptionalism, and exposes the complex impacts of colonialism in the Global North and the Global South, as depicted in twentieth-century literature.