Abolitionist Places

Abolitionist Places

From David Brion Davis’s The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution to Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, some of the most influential conceptualizations of the Atlantic World have […]


The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century

The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century

In this highly original reexamination of North American poetry in English from Ezra Pound to the present day, Christopher Nealon demonstrates that the most vital writing of the period is […]


War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime

War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime

What does it mean to live during wartime away from the battle zone? What is it like for citizens to go about daily routines while their country sends soldiers to […]


Plummet

Plummet

Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America

Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America

In a culture deeply divided along ethnic lines, the idea that the relationship between blacks and Jews was once thought special–indeed, critical to the cause of civil rights–might seem strange. […]


Howards End, A Longman Cultural Edition

Howards End, A Longman Cultural Edition

Art and commerce, nature and industry, idealism and pragmatism, women and men: the struggles, partings, and reconciliations between these pairs drive the narrative of one of the great English novels […]


King’s Dream: The Legacy of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” Speech

King’s Dream: The Legacy of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” Speech

“I have a dream”—no words are more widely recognized, or more often repeated, than those called out from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial by Martin Luther King, Jr., in […]


The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

“In some moods, or for some people, the desire to improve can seem so natural as to be banal. The impulse drives forward so much in our culture that it […]


Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature, 1860-1960

Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature, 1860-1960

When Oscar Wilde said he had “seen wallpaper which must lead a boy brought up under its influence to a life of crime,” his joke played on an idea that […]


The Grounds of English Literature

The Grounds of English Literature

The centuries just after the Norman Conquest are the forgotten period of English literary history. In fact, the years 1066-1300 witnessed an unparalleled ingenuity in the creation of written forms, […]