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Walt Whitman has long been regarded as the quintessential American bard, the poet who best represents all that is distinctive about life in the United States. Whitman himself encouraged this view, but he was also quick to remind his readers that he was an unlikely candidate for the office of national poet, and that his working-class upbringing and radical take on human sexuality often put him at odds with American culture. While American literary history has tended to credit Whitman with having invented the persona of the national outsider as the national bard, this book recovers three of Whitman's contemporaries who adopted similar personae: James M. Whitfield, an African American separatist and abolitionist; Eliza R. Snow, a Mormon pioneer and women's leader; and John Rollin Ridge, a Cherokee journalist and Native-rights advocate. These three poets not only provide a counterpoint to the Whitmanian persona of the outsider bard, but also reframe the criteria by which generations of scholars have characterized Whitman as America's poet.

This book, the final volume of a trilogy, brings the author's multigenerational history of Communist writers to a climax. Using new research to explore the intimate lives of novelists, poets, and critics during the Cold War, it reveals a radical community longing for the rebirth of the social vision of the 1930s and struggling with a loss of moral certainty as the Communist worldview was being called into question. The resulting literature, the author shows, is a haunting record of fracture and struggle linked by common structures of feeling, ones more suggestive of the “negative dialectics” of Theodor Adorno than the traditional social realism of the Left. Establishing new points of contact among Kenneth Fearing, Ann Petry, Alexander Saxton, Richard Wright, Jo Sinclair, Thomas McGrath, and Carlos Bulosan, the author argues that these writers were in dialogue with psychoanalysis, existentialism, and postwar modernism, often generating moods of piercing emotional acuity and cosmic dissent. He also recounts the contributions of lesser-known cultural workers, with a unique accent on gays and lesbians, secular Jews, and people of color. The vexing ambiguities of an era the author labels “late antifascism” serve to frame a collective biography.

In this thought-provoking study of nineteenth-century America, J. Samaine Lockwood offers an important new interpretation of the literary movement known as American regionalism. Lockwood argues that regionalism in New England was part of a widespread woman-dominated effort to rewrite history. Lockwood demonstrates that New England regionalism was an intellectual endeavor that overlapped with colonial revivalism and included fiction and history writing, antique collecting, colonial home restoration, and photography. The cohort of writers and artists leading this movement included Sarah Orne Jewett, Alice Morse Earle, and C. Alice Baker, and their project was taken up by women of a younger generation, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, who extended regionalism through the modernist moment. Lockwood draws on a diverse archive that includes fiction, material culture, collecting guides, and more. Showing how these women intellectuals aligned themselves with a powerful legacy of social and cultural dissent, Lockwood reveals that New England regionalism performed queer historical work, placing unmarried women and their myriad desires at the center of both regional and national history.

John Lowe explodes old notions of region by exploring the effect of the Caribbean on Southern literature, and conversely, how the writers of the coastal U.S. have influenced artists “South of the South.” Two chapters consider how armed conflict - the Haitian Revolution and the U.S. Mexican War - created a new awareness of the South as the northern rim of the Caribbean. Other chapters pair writers whose works map out the “Caribbean Imaginary” (Martin Delany and Lucy Holcombe Pickens); the idea of the “transnational South (Constance Fenimore Woolson and Lafcadio Hearn); common folk cultures (Claude McKay and Zora Neale Hurston); and overlapping narratives of resistance (Richard Wright and George Lamming). The final chapter insists on the inclusion of Cuban American writers in the canon of Southern literature, while demonstrating their importance to the emerging concept of the circumCaribbean. Employing key critics of Caribbean and post-colonial literature, such as Édouard Glissant, Antonio Benitez-Rojo, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Franz Fanon, Wilson Harris, Valerie Loichot, J. Michael Dash, Aimé Césaire, and Edward Said, Lowe’s reading are contextualized with hemispheric history, especially that of Cuba, Haiti, Barbados, Jamaica, Mexico, Louisiana, and Florida. His readings revolve around innovative concepts of the Caribbean imaginary and the tropical sublime, and interrogate recent critical categories, such as diaspora, the Black Atlantic, and new approaches to colonialism and post-colonialism. Calypso Magnolia contributes a striking reconfiguration of the “New Southern Studies,” the global South, and hemispheric and Atlantic Studies.

This volume is a collected edition of poems by Jean Toomer, the enigmatic American writer, Gurdjieffian guru, and Quaker convert who is perhaps best known for his 1923 lyrical narrative Cane. The fifty-five poems here chart an evolution of artistic consciousness. The book is divided into sections reflecting four distinct periods of creativity in Toomer's career. The Aesthetic period includes Imagist, symbolist, and other experimental pieces, such as “Five Vignettes,” while “Georgia Dusk” and the newly discovered poem “Tell Me” come from Toomer's Ancestral Consciousness period in the early 1920s. “The Blue Meridian” and other Objective Consciousness poems reveal the influence of idealist philosopher Georges Gurdjieff. Among the works of this period the book presents a group of local color poems picturing the landscape of the American Southwest, including “Imprint for Rio Grande.” “It Is Everywhere,” another newly discovered poem, celebrates America and democratic idealism. The Quaker religious philosophy of Toomer's final years is demonstrated in such Christian Existential works as “They Are Not Missed” and “To Gurdjieff Dying.” The introduction examines the major poems in this volume and serves as a guide through the stages of Toomer's evolution as an artist and thinker.

American literary nationalism is traditionally understood as a cohesive literary tradition developed in the newly independent United States that emphasized the unique features of America and consciously differentiated American literature from British literature. This book challenges this assessment by exploring the conflicted, multiracial, and contingent dimensions present in the works of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American and African American writers. Conflict and uncertainty, not consensus, it argues, helped define American literary nationalism during this period. The book emphasizes the centrality of both inter- and intra-American conflict in its analysis of four illuminating “episodes” of literary responses to questions of U.S. racial nationalism and imperialism. It examines Charles Brockden Brown and the Louisiana Purchase; David Walker and the debates on the Missouri Compromise; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Hannah Crafts and the blood-based literary nationalism and expansionism of the mid-nineteenth century; and Frederick Douglass and his approximately forty-year interest in Haiti. The book offers critiques of recent developments in whiteness and imperialism studies, arguing that a renewed attention to the place of contingency in American literary history helps us to better understand and learn from writers trying to make sense of their own historical moments.

Gabriel García Márquez is one of the most influential writers of our time, with a unique literary creativity rooted in the history of his native Colombia. This revised and expanded edition of a classic work is the first book of criticism to consider in detail the totality of his magnificent oeuvre. This book traces the major forces that have shaped the novelist and describes García Márquez's life, his personality, and his politics. For this edition, new chapters cover all of García Márquez's fiction since 1988, from The General in His Labyrinth through Memories of My Melancholy Whores, and includes sections on his memoir, Living to Tell the Tale, and his journalistic account, News of a Kidnapping. Moreover, new information about García Márquezz's biography and artistic development make this a comprehensive account of his life and work.

Americans have always shown a fascination with the people, customs, and legends of the “East”—witness the popularity of the stories of the Arabian Nights, the performances of Arab belly dancers and acrobats, the feats of turban-wearing vaudeville magicians, and even the antics of fez-topped Shriners. This book provides a social and cultural history of this highly popular genre of Easternized performance in America up to the Great Depression. It argues that these traditions reveal how a broad spectrum of Americans, including recent immigrants and impersonators, behaved as producers and consumers in a rapidly developing capitalist economy. In admiration of the Arabian Nights, people creatively reenacted Eastern life, but, as the book shows, these performances were also demonstrations of Americans' own identities. The story of Aladdin, made suddenly rich by rubbing an old lamp, stood as a particularly apt metaphor for how consumer capitalism might benefit each person. The leisure, abundance, and contentment that many imagined were typical of Eastern life were the same characteristics used to define “the American dream.” The recent success of Disney's Aladdin suggests that many Americans still welcome an interpretation of the East as a site of incredible riches, romance, and happy endings. This account explains why and how so many Americans sought out such cultural engagement with the Eastern world long before geopolitical concerns became paramount.

Working to reconcile the Christian dictum to “love one's neighbor as oneself” with evidence of U.S. sociopolitical aggression, including slavery, corporal punishment of children, and Indian removal, this book focuses its attention on aggressors—rather than the weak or abused—to suggest ways of understanding paradoxical relationships between empathy, violence, and religion that took hold so strongly in nineteenth-century American culture. Looking at works by Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott, among others, the author shows how violence and sensibility work together to produce a more “sensitive” citizenry. Aggression becomes a site of redemptive possibility because salvation is gained when the powerful protagonist identifies with the person he harms. The author argues that this identification and emotional transformation come at a high price, however, as the reparative ends are bought with another's blood. Critics of nineteenth-century literature have tended to think about sentimentality and violence as opposing strategies in the work of nation-building and in the formation of U.S. national identity. Yet to understand how violence gets folded into sentimentality's egalitarian goals is to recognize, importantly, the deep entrenchment of aggression in the empathetic structures of liberal, Christian culture in the United States.

“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1841. While this statement may read like an innocuous truism today, the claim would have been controversial in the antebellum United States when enthusiasm was a hotly contested term associated with religious fanaticism and poetic inspiration, revolutionary politics and imaginative excess. In analyzing the language of enthusiasm in philosophy, religion, politics, and literature, John Mac Kilgore uncovers a tradition of enthusiasm linked to a politics of emancipation. The dissenting voices chronicled here fought against what they viewed as tyranny while using their writings to forge international or antinationalistic political affiliations. Pushing his analysis across national boundaries, Kilgore contends that American enthusiastic literature, unlike the era’s concurrent sentimental counterpart, stressed democratic resistance over domestic reform as it navigated the global political sphere. By analyzing a range of canonical American authors—including William Apess, Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Walt Whitman—Kilgore places their works in context with the causes, wars, and revolutions that directly or indirectly engendered them. In doing so, he makes a unique and compelling case for enthusiasm’s centrality in the shaping of American literary history.