An electric essay collection about Blackness, art, and dreaming of new possibilities in a time of constrictionThis collection of innovative, penetrating, and lively essays features swimming pools and poets, road trips and museums, family dinners and...

This singular collection is nothing less than a political, spiritual, and intensely personal record of America’s tumultuous modern age, as experienced by our foremost critics, commentators, activists, and artists. Joyce Carol Oates has collected a group...

How do the stories we tell about money shape our economies?Beginning in the late eighteenth century, as constant growth became the economic norm throughout Europe, fictional stories involving money were overwhelmingly about loss. Novel after novel tells...

Prodigy, visionary, 'outlaw,' orator and explorer. As society's outsiders, the exceptional subjects of this study inspired a new breed of women—and one another.Finalist of the PROSE Award for Best Book in Literature by the Association of American...

Haunting’s consequences for the literary imagination.Reading is a weirdly phantasmic trade: animating words to revive absent voices, rehearing the past, fantasizing a future. In Romantic Shades and Shadows, Susan J. Wolfson explores spectral language,...

Letters played a foundational role in facilitating the rise of print and popularizing new modes of writing in the long eighteenth century.In Writing to the World, Rachael Scarborough King examines the shift from manuscript to print media culture in the...

How did modernist poetry respond—both thematically and technically—to communism?In Red Modernism, Mark Steven asserts that modernism was highly attuned—and aesthetically responsive—to the overall spirit of communism. He considers the maturation of...

The story of the scientist in Western culture, from medieval images of alchemists to present-day depictions of cyberpunks and genetic engineers.They were mad, of course. Or evil. Or godless, amoral, arrogant, impersonal, and inhuman. At best, they were...

The forgotten history of comedy’s contribution to world democracy.For two thousand years, democratic authors treated comedy as a toolkit of rhetorical practices for encouraging problem-solving, pluralism, risk-taking, and other civic behaviors that...

The rise of modern science stirred up a mix of unease and exhilaration that profoundly influenced early modern English literature.During the scientific revolution, the dominant Aristotelian picture of nature, which cohered closely with common sense and...

Paulson examines literary, philosophical, and pedagogical writing on blindness in France from the Enlightenment, when philosophical speculation and surgical cures for cataracts demystified the difference between the blind and the sighted, to the...

"Offering a deeply necessary, clear-eyed look at who we are as flesh-and-bone bodies during the climate crisis, this is a book that searches and finds meaning in both the hard truths and the value of wonder."--Ada Limón In this luminous collection of...

This brilliant and insightful contribution to cultural studies investigates the role of literature—particularly the novel—and visual arts in the development of institutions. Arguing the attitudes expressed in narrative literature and art between 1719 and...

"In the decades spanning the nineteenth century, thousands of women entered the literary marketplace. Twelve of the century's most successful women writers provide the focus for Mary Kelley's landmark study: Maria Cummins, Caroline Howard Gilman,...

From the "strikingly smart and daringly feminist" (Jenny Offill) author of Margaret the First and SPRAWL comes a prose collection like no other, where different styles of writing and different spaces of experience create a collage of the depths and...

"Moretti's thoughts on teaching literature in American universities, with excursions not just on novels and plays but also film, painting, and intellectual life in general"--