The Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV

The story of a new style of art—and a new way of life—in postwar America: confessionalism. What do midcentury “confessional” poets have in common with today’s reality TV stars? They […]


Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange

Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange

Why should the earliest literary encounters between China and the United States—and their critical interpretation—matter now? How can they help us describe cultural exchanges in which nothing substantial is exchanged, […]


Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature

Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature

Consulting an extensive archive of early modern literature, Joy of the Worm asserts that voluntary death in literature is not always a matter of tragedy. In this study, Drew Daniel identifies a […]


The Critique of Nonviolence: Martin Luther King, Jr., and Philosophy

The Critique of Nonviolence: Martin Luther King, Jr., and Philosophy

How does Martin Luther King, Jr., understand race philosophically and how did this understanding lead him to develop an ontological conception of racist police violence? In this important new work, […]


My Father’s Name: A Black Virginia Family after the Civil War

My Father’s Name: A Black Virginia Family after the Civil War

Armed with only early boyhood memories, Lawrence P. Jackson begins his quest by setting out from his home in Baltimore for Pittsylvania County, Virginia, to try to find his late […]


The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960

The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960

The Indignant Generation is the first narrative history of the neglected but essential period of African American literature between the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights era. The years between […]


Hold It Real Still: Clint Eastwood, Race, and the Cinema of the American West

Hold It Real Still: Clint Eastwood, Race, and the Cinema of  the American West

How did the American western feature film genre rebrand itself in the late seventies and respond to the fury of global and domestic political affairs? In Hold It Real Still, […]


Shelter: A Black Tale of Homeland, Baltimore

Shelter: A Black Tale of Homeland, Baltimore

A stirring consideration of homeownership, fatherhood, race, faith, and the history of an American city. In 2016, Lawrence Jackson accepted a new job in Baltimore, searched for schools for his […]


Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory

Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory

This unorthodox account of 1960s Black thought rigorously details the field’s debts to German critical theory and explores a forgotten tradition of Black singularity. Phenomenal Blackness examines the changing interdisciplinary […]


The New Modernist Studies

The New Modernist Studies

This is the first book specifically devoted to the new modernist studies. Bringing together a range of perspectives on the past, present, and future of this vibrant, complicated scholarly enterprise, […]