Derived from the Latin abiectus , literally meaning «thrown or cast down,» «abjection» names the condition of being servile, wretched, or contemptible. In Western religious tradition, to be abject is to submit to bodily suffering or psychological mortification for the good of the soul. In Cast Down: Abjection in America, 1700-1850 , Mark J. Miller argues that transatlantic Protestant discourses of abjection engaged with, and furthered the deve ...
For Jeffrey Masten, the history of sexuality and the history of language are intimately related. In Queer Philologies , he studies particular terms that illuminate the history of sexuality in Shakespeare's time and analyzes the methods we have used to study sex and gender in literary and cultural history. Building on the work of theorists and historians who have, following Foucault, investigated the importance of words like «homosexual,» « ...
The letter is a powerfully evocative form that has gained in resonance as the habits of personal letter writing have declined in a digital age. But faith in the letter as evidence of the intimate thoughts of individuals underplays the sophisticated ways letters functioned in the past. In Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain leading scholars approach the letter from a variety of disciplinary perspectives to uncover the habits, for ...
What does it mean for a child to be a «reader» and how did American culture come to place such a high value on this identity? Reading Children offers a history of the relationship between children and books in Anglo-American modernity, exploring long-lived but now forgotten early children's literature, discredited yet highly influential pedagogical practices, the property lessons inherent in children's book ownership, and the emergen ...
American literary studies has undergone a series of field redefinitions over the past two decades that have been consistently described as «turns,» whether transnational, hemispheric, postnational, spatial, temporal, postsecular, aesthetic, or affective. In Turns of Event , Hester Blum and a splendid roster of contributors explore the conditions that have produced such movements. Offering an overview of the state of the study of nineteenth-cent ...
Sea-Brothers offers the most extensive analysis to date of the sea and its meaning in American literature. On the basis of his study of Melville, Crane, London, Hemingway, Matthiessen, and ten lesser-known sea-writers, Bert Bender argues that the tradition of American sea fiction did not end with the opening of the western frontier and the replacement of sailing ships by steamers. Rather, he demonstrates its continuity and vitality, identifyin ...
