American literary history of the nineteenth-century as a conflict between individualistic writers and a conformist society. In The Social Self, Joseph Alkana argues that such a dichotomy misrepresents the views of many authors.Sudden changes caused by the industrial revolution, urban development, increased immigration, and regional conflicts were threatening to fragment the community, and such writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, William James, and William Dean Howells were deeply concerned about social cohesion. Alkana persuasively reintroduces Common Sense philosophy and Jamesian psychology as ways to understand how the nineteenth-century self/society dilemma developed.All three writers believed that introspection was the proper path to the discovery of truth. They also felt, Alkana argues, that such discoveries had to be validated by society. In these sophisticated readings of Hawthorne's short stories and The Scarlet Letter, Howells's utopian Altrurian romances, and James's The Principles of Psychology, it becomes obvious that characters who isolate themselves from the community do so at considerable psychological risk.The Social Self links these writers' interest in contemporary psychology to their concern for history and society. Alkana's argument that nineteenth-century expressions of individualism were defensive responses to the fear of social chaos radically revises the traditional narrative of American literary culture.

First published in 1913, The Heart of the Hills is the last novel completed by John Fox Jr. and the final piece in his mountain trilogy. This companion to The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine is crucial to an understanding of Fox's views. In The Heart of the Hills Fox revises his earlier thoughts about mountain people. He depicts more clearly than in his previous work just how they were exploited by outside industrialists-those men who, in the words of Fox's hero Jason Hawn, "got rich diggin' our coal an' cuttin' our timber." He also reveals the long-term impact of this exploitation on the environment. Having witnessed the ravages of clearcutting on his travels through the mountain country of Kentucky and Virginia in 1911-1912, Fox was all the more receptive to the warnings voiced by his environmentally conscious father. From their letters and diaries it is clear that John Fox Sr.'s influence permeates The Heart of the Hills; in this work, dedicated to his dying father, Fox determined to make amends to the mountain people.

Edward J. Jeffries Jr., was elected mayor of Detroit in 1937 and for a decade led the city through a period of race riots, union turmoil, and unprecedented growth. Jeffries's circle of friends was made up primarily of newspaper reporters who shared his interests and lifestyle. Devoted to family, they nevertheless worked long hours, smoked heavily, drank moderately, and gambled often in their running card games of gin and poker.After Pearl Harbor, Jeffries watched his closest friends, most twelve to fourteen years his junior, enlist in the armed forces. Voracious letter writers, over the next four years they shared with one another their innermost hopes and fears. They told stories about Gen. George S. Patton, the surrender of Japan, of commanding African American soldiers during the Normandy invasion, and the battles on the home front in the heart of Detroit, the "Arsenal of Democracy."These letters present a candid portrait of the intellectual and political leadership of Detroit -- and America. These men were confident in their values, aware of their responsibilities, and logical in their actions as they helped forge the weapons that turned back the fascist threat to democracy. Their letters also reveal a level and kind of male camaraderie seemingly lost in the depersonalized, technocratic society of the postwar era. As such, this work provides a more complete understanding of how Americans reacted to -- and were changed by -- the "Good War."

In this volume, leading scholars on the history of the Kurds lay out the case that the Kurdish Question looms as one of the largest threats to peace and stability in the Middle East. With the majority of Kurds living within its borders, no country faces this threat more squarely than Turkey, whose concept of a unified, cohesive nation -- in which the existence of ethnic minorities is not acknowledged -- makes the powder keg more difficult to manage than elsewhere. Separate sections examine the development of the movement and explore its influence on Turkey's foreign, domestic, and human rights policies, in the end questioning the viability of the Turkish state as presently constituted.

Angel, Interupted is Reginald Shepherd’s second poetry collection. The poems are lyrical, streetwise and contemporary, yet timeless, classically referential, and introspective.

Observing that poetry is a natural part of our pastimes and rituals, Muriel Rukeyser explores the vital force of poetry and the arts in American culture. She opposes elitist attitudes and addresses Americans’ fear of feeling, which contribute to a devaluation of poetry and the arts in the U.S. Multicultural and interdisciplinary, this collection of essays makes an irrefutable case for the centrality of poetry in American life.

The citizens of the small town of Blakesburg see the aurora borealis and decide Judgment Day has come in this 1946 best-seller.

The wondrous subtlety of David Ignatow's art is brought to bear on the timeless themes of love and death. Intimate remembrances evince a rich life: Hebrew lessons, war, first love, friendships with Stanley Kunitz and others, his wife's death. One poem comments on another, often with wit and irony; no statement is ever final. In this way, Ignatow shows that we exist most fully in the fluidity of our perceptions and in our inability to attain a single state of mind or definition of things. I Have A Name is a vital engagement with life and an unflinching stare at death, concluding that love transcendent is a reality, embracing all, the living and the dead.

"Irish man of letters MacNamara is perhaps best known for his brilliantly perceptive satire, The Valley of the Squinting Windows (1918), but it is this, his sixth novel, published in 1929, which is considered his most innovative work… It is a fascinating example of early-twentieth century Irish writing, in which tradition follow writers such as Flann O'Brien and John Banville." - Publishers Weekly. "[This is] easily the author's best book… The novel is a fabulist satire, or a satirical - fantasy. The novel has variously been characterized as a meditation on the autonomy of literature, on the immortality of the artist, existence, non-being and reality."--Rudiger Imhof, The Irish Times. "A good addition to literature collections." - Library Journal.

Victorian fiction has been read and analyzed from a wide range of perspectives in the past century. But how did the novelists themselves read and respond to each other's creations when they first appeared? Jerome Meckier answers that intriguing question in this ground-breaking study of what he terms the Victorian realism wars. Meckier argues that nineteenth-century British fiction should be seen as a network of intersecting reactions and counteractions in which the novelists rethought and rewrote each other's novels as a way of enhancing their own credibility. In an increasingly relative world, thanks to the triumph of a scientific secularity, the goal of the novelist was to establish his or her own credentials as a realist, hence a reliable social critic, by undercutting someone else's -- usually Charles Dickens's.Trollope, Mrs. Gaskell, and especially George Eliot attempted to make room for themselves in the 1850s and 1860s by pushing Dickens aside. Wilkie Collins tried a different form of parodic revaluation: he strove to outdo Dickens at the kind of novel Dickens thought he did best, the kind his other rivals tried to cancel, tone down, or repair, ostensibly for being too melodramatic but actually for expressing too negative a world view.For his part, Dickens -- determined to remain inimitable -- replied to all of his rivals by redoing them as spiritedly as they had reused his characters and situations to make their own statements and to discredit his.Thus Meckier redefines Victorian realism as the bravura assertion by a major novelist (or one soon to be) that he or she was a better realist than Dickens. By suggesting the ways Victorian novelist read and rewrote each other's work, this innovative study alters present day perceptions of such double-purpose novels as Felix Holt, Bleak House, Middlemarch, North and South, Hard Times, The Woman in White, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Marine Corps Fighter Squadron 214 was hastily organized in the field during World War II to meet the urgent need for another combat squadron in the South Pacific. The squadron, self-named the "Black Sheep," went on under the leadership of the swashbuckling "Pappy" Boyington to become the most famous in Marine Corps history. Now comes the true story of the Black Sheep Squadron and the men who wrote its record in the Pacific skies. Once They Were Eagles tells how and why the squadron was formed, provides brief sketches of every member, and creates a vivid picture of the exciting but deadly aerial sorties over the South Pacific. Frank E. Walton located the thirty-four survivors of the fifty-one original Black Sheep. In a unique series of interviews, former "Eagles" share their recollections of those days of high adventure and their experiences in the years to follow.

The locales of these poems range from the mountains of western Pennsylvania to the Andes, the subjects from memories of Kilwein Guevara’s native Colombia to a New York street scene. What characterizes all of them is precise and surprising language, a brilliance of effect, that establishes him as one of the most original young American poets.

Lady Mary Wroth (c. 1587-1653) wrote the first sonnet sequence in English by a woman, one of the first plays by a woman, and the first published work of fiction by an Englishwoman. Yet, despite her status as a member of the distinguished Sidney family, Wroth met with disgrace at court for her authorship of a prose romance, which was adjudged an inappropriate endeavor for a woman and was forcibly withdrawn from publication. Only recently has recognition of Wroth's historical and literary importance been signaled by the publication of the first modern edition of her romance, The Countess of Mountgomeries Urania.Naomi Miller offers an illuminating study of this significant early modern woman writer. Using multiple critical/theoretical perspectives, including French feminism, new historicism, and cultural materialism, she examines gender in Wroth's time. Moving beyond the emphasis on victimization that shaped many previous studies, she considers the range of strategies devised by women writers of the period to establish voices for themselves.Where previous critics have viewed Wroth primarily in relation to her male literary predecessors in the Sidney family, Miller explores Wroth's engagement with a variety of discourses, reading her in relation to a broad range of English and continental authors, both male and female, from Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare to Aemilia Lanier, Elizabeth Cary, and Marguerite de Navarre. She also contextualizes Wroth's writing in relation to a variety of nonliterary texts of the period, both political and domestic. Thanks to Miller's sensitive readings, Wroth's writings provide a lens through which to view gender relations in the early modern period.

Of the great epic poets in the Western tradition, Luis Vaz de Camões (c. 1524- 1580) remains perhaps the least known outside his native Portugal, and his influence on literature in English has not been fully recognized. In this major work of comparative scholarship, George Monteiro thus breaks new ground, focusing on English-language writers whose vision and expression have been sharpened by their varied responses to Camões. Introduced to English readers in 1655, Camões's work from the beginning appealed strongly to writers. The young Elizabeth Barrett's Camonean poems, for example, inspired Edgar Allan Poe to appropriate elements from Camões. Herman Melville's reading of Camões bore fruit in his career-long borrowings from the Portuguese poet. Longfellow, T.W. Higginson, and Emily Dickinson read and championed Camões. AndCamões as epicist and love poet is an éminence grise in several of Elizabeth Bishop's strongest Brazilian poems. Southern African writers have interpreted and reinterpreted Adamastor, Camões's Spirit of the Cape, as both a symbol of a dangerous and mysterious Africa and an emblem of European imperialism.Recognizing the presence of Camões leads Monteiro to provocative rereadings of such texts as Dickinson's "Master" letters, Poe's "Raven," Melville's late poetry, and Bishop's Questions of Travel.

Readers in the sixteenth century read (that is, interpreted) texts quite differently from the way contemporary readers do; they were trained to notice different aspects of a text and to process them differently.Using educational works of Erasmus, Ascham, and others, commentaries on literary works, various kinds of religious guides and homilies, and self-improvement books, Kintgen has found specific evidence of these differences and makes imaginative use of it to draw fascinating and convincing conclusions about the art and practice of reading. Kintgen ends by situating the book within literary theory, cognitive science, and literary studies. Among the writers covered are Gabriel Harvey, E. K. (the commentator on The Shepheardes Calendar), Sir John Harrington, George Gascoigne, George Puttenham, Thomas Blundeville, and Angel Day.

Peter Meinke is one of the most readable poets. The surface clarity of his lines and his aptness for metaphor make these poems accessible and mysterious. They have real subjects - Dessert Storm and acorns, coffee and Tolstoy - but at the same time give entry to that interior world where all feelings and moralities grow.