Written as a cultural weapon and a call to arms, Howl touched a raw nerve in Cold War America and has been controversial from the day it was first read aloud nearly fifty years ago. This first full critical and historical study of Howl brilliantly elucidates the nexus of politics and literature in which it was written and gives striking new portraits of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. Drawing from newly released psychiatric reports on Ginsberg, from interviews with his psychiatrist, Dr. Philip Hicks, and from the poet's journals, American Scream shows how Howl brought Ginsberg and the world out of the closet of a repressive society.

" Langston Hughes was one of the most important American writers of his generation and one of the most versatile, producing poetry, fiction, drama, and autobiography. In this innovative study, R. Baxter Miller explores Hughes's life and art in an effort to broaden our appreciation of his contribution to American letters.

Considers Gilman's place in American literary and social history by examining her relationships to other prominent intellectuals of her era By placing Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the company of her contemporaries, this collection seeks to correct misunderstandings of the feminist writer and lecturer as an isolated radical. Gilman believed and preached that no life is ever led in isolation; indeed, the cornerstone of her philosophy was the idea that "humanity is a relation."   Gilman's highly public and combative stances as a critic and social activist brought her into contact and conflict with many of the major thinkers and writers of the period, including Mary Austin, Margaret Sanger, Ambrose Bierce, Grace Ellery Channing, Lester Ward, Inez Haynes Gillmore, William Randolph Hearst, Karen Horney, William Dean Howells, Catharine Beecher, George Bernard Shaw, and Owen Wister. Gilman wrote on subjects as wide ranging as birth control, eugenics, race, women's rights and suffrage, psychology, Marxism, and literary aesthetics. Her many contributions to social, intellectual, and literary life at the turn of the 20th century raised the bar for future discourse, but at great personal and professional cost.  

Contradictory Woolf is a collection of essays selected from approximately 200 papers presented at the 21st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, hosted by the University of Glasgow. The theme of contradiction in Woolf's writing, including her use of the word 'but', is widely explored in relation to auto/biography, art, philosophy, cognitive science, sexuality, animality, class, mathematics, translation, annotation, poetry, and war. Among the essays collected in this volume are the five keynote addresses-by Judith Allen, Suzanne Bellamy, Marina Warner, Patricia Waugh, and Michael Whitworth-as well as a preface by Jane Goldman and an introduction by the editors.

This book traces W.E.B. Du Bois's fictionalization of history in his five major works of fiction and in his debut short story The Souls of Black Folk through a thematic framework of cosmopolitanism. In texts like The Negro and Black Folk: Then and Now, Du Bois argues that the human race originated from a single source, a claim authenticated by anthropologists and the Human Genome Project. This book breaks new ground by demonstrating the fashion in which the variants of cosmopolitanism become a profound theme in Du Bois's contribution to fiction. In general, cosmopolitanism claims that people belong to a single community informed by common moral values, function through a shared economic nomenclature, and are part of political systems grounded in mutual respect. This book addresses Du Bois's works as important additions to the academy and makes a significant contribution to literature by first demonstrating the way in which fiction could be utilized in discussing historical accounts in order to reach a global audience. "The Coming of John", The Quest of the Silver Fleece, Dark Princess: A Romance, and The Black Flame, an important trilogy published sequentially as The Ordeal of Mansart, Mansart Builds a School, and Worlds of Color are grounded in historical occurrences and administer as social histories providing commentary on Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, African American leadership, school desegregation, the Pan-African movement, imperialism, and colonialism in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.

No one better symbolizes the course of modern literature ­ its triumphs and defeats ­ than Pound. From the dreaminess and aestheticism of his early poems, to his Imagist and Vorticist manifestos, to the formally experimental method and mythic engagement with history in The Cantos, Pound marks the path that modern and postmodern poetry would follow. This collection provides a documentary record of the reviews of Ezra Pound's work in contemporary journals and newspapers, an introduction that traces the public outrage and controversy that characterized Pound's reception, and checklists of all known reviews of Pound's work. Most of the major poets and critics of the twentieth-century reviewed Pound's work, including T. S. Eliot, Ford Maddox Ford, William Carlos Williams and Edmund Wilson. Their multiple, perplexed, and sometimes hostile responses to his work provide a rich record of the struggles that marked the emergence of modern and contemporary poetry and poetics.

To augment the increasing critical interest in the novels of American writer Chopin (1851-1904), Evans provides plot synopses and summaries of the critical reception of her short stories. In chronological articles, he attempts to mention every significant comment made about each story, including those made in such often neglected references as dictionaries of literary biography, dissertations, and introductions and prefaces of particular editions.

Though Wallace Stevens' shorter poems are perhaps his best known, his longer poems, Helen Hennessy Vendler suggests in this book, deserve equal fame and equal consideration. Stevens' central theme--the worth of the imagination--remained with him all his life, and Mrs. Vendler therefore proposes that his development as a poet can best be seen, not in description--which must be repetitive--of the abstract bases of his work, but rather in a view of his changing styles. The author presents here a chronological account of fourteen longer poems that span a thirty-year period, showing, through Stevens' experiments in genre, diction, syntax, voice, imagery, and meter, the inventive variety of Stevens' work in long forms, and providing at the same time a coherent reading of these difficult poems. She concludes, "Stevens was engaged in constant experimentation all his life in an attempt to find the appropriate vehicle for his expansive consciousness; he found it in his later long poems, which surpass in value the rest of his work."

Since Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, some scholars have privately suspected that King's "dream" was connected to Langston Hughes's poetry. Drawing on archival materials, including notes, correspondence, and marginalia, W. Jason Miller provides a completely original and compelling argument that Hughes's influence on King's rhetoric was, in fact, evident in more than just the one famous speech. King's staff had been wiretapped by J. Edgar Hoover and suffered accusations of communist influence, so quoting or naming the leader of the Harlem Renaissance-who had his own reputation as a communist-would only have intensified the threats against the civil rights activist. Thus, the link was purposefully veiled through careful allusions in King's orations. In Origins of the Dream, Miller lifts that veil and shows how Hughes's revolutionary poetry became a measurable inflection in King's voice. He contends that by employing Hughes's metaphors in his speeches, King negotiated a political climate that sought to silence the poet's subversive voice. By separating Hughes's identity from his poems, King helped the nation unconsciously embrace the incendiary ideas behind his poetry.

'Provides a compelling argument for Plath's revision of the painful parts of her life--the failed marriage, her anxiety for success, and her ambivalence towards her mother. . . . The reader will feel the tension in the poetry and the life.'Choice '[Examines] Plath's twin goals of becoming a famous poet and a perfect mother. . . . This book's main points are clearly and forcefully argued: that both poems and babies require 'struggle, pain, endless labor, and . . . fears of monstrous offspring' and that, in the end, Plath ran out of the resources necessary to produce both. Often maligned as a self-indulgent confessional poet, Plath is here retrieved as a passionate theorist.'--Library Journal Susan Van Dyne's reading of twenty-five of Sylvia Plath's Ariel poems considers three contexts: Plath's journal entries from 1957 to 1959 (especially as they reveal her conflicts over what it meant to be a middle-class wife and mother and an aspiring writer in 1950s America); the interpretive strategies of feminist theory; and Plath's multiple revisions of the poems.

Published in 1903, The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois was a landmark achievement, moving American philosophy beyond the structures of pragmatism and positivism as it addressed new questions about American social and political history. One hundred years later, Du Bois's classic still resonates in twentieth-century thought, offering a critical perspective on the political, social, and economic encumbrances imposed upon blacks during Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction America. This important new book is the first collection of essays to examine sustainedly The Souls of Black Folk from a variety of disciplines: aesthetics, art history, classics, communications, history, literature, music, political science, and psychology. The authors' observations establish a rythm of call and response as they examine the critical depth of a text that has had a profound influence on African American intellectual history. Implicitly, the essays show how The Souls of Black Folk has influenced teaching practices and suggested alternative ways of teaching that create a pedagogy of inclusion. The Souls of Black Folk remains a pivotal text in the American understanding of the black experience,

Almost all Gilman's work asserts optimistically the possibility for utopian change, yet ironically she is probably most widely celebrated for her darkly tragic story The Yellow Wallpaper. The focus of this essay collection is Gilman's utopianism. Her best-known and critically addressed novelis Herland, and several contributors revisit it in order to deepen our understanding of the complexity of Gilman's utopian vision. The lesser-known Moving the Mountain - deserving of more attention than it has received - is the subject of a full essay, and other essays explore utopian ideas inGilman's short stories.

"A passionate, political and provocative study" Patricia Clements, Professor Emeritus, University of Alberta, and founding director of The Orlando Project Times Higher Education Magazine "The distillation of many years of sparklingly erudite scholarship and continuing incisive debate, Judith Allen's book is essential reading for anyone concerned by current and disturbing ramifications of the politics of language and the language of politics in the modern world. She provides a generously open guide to many of Woolf's most influential essays as well as to her major manifestos, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas" Dr Jane Goldman, Reader in English Literature, University of Glasgow "Guided by Montaigne's trenchant question, 'What do I know?', Judith Allen shows how the lexicon of war in the twenty-first century can be revealed in all its lamentable 'truthiness' by paying attention to what Virginia Woolf's essays have to say about the power of language to transform our world. This is a book that makes refreshingly clear Woolf's deep political engagement with the urgent issues of war and peace." Mark Hussey, Editor, Woolf Studies Annual Judith Allen's timely study ranges from Michel de Montaigne to Jon Stewart, from the Northcliffe Press empire of World War I to Rupert Murdoch's current media empire, and explores the increasing influence of social media. Allen approaches Woolf as a theorist of language as well as a theorist of reading, and shows how her writing strategies - sometimes single, resonant words - function to express and enact her politics. Close readings of many essays, including 'Montaigne' and 'Craftsmanship', reveal how Woolf's complex arguments serve to awaken her readers to the complexities and power of language.

In this book, Stephanie J. Shaw brings a new understanding to one of the great documents of American and black history. While most scholarly discussions of The Souls of Black Folk focus on the veils, the color line, double consciousness, or Booker T. Washington, Shaw reads Du Bois' book as a profoundly nuanced interpretation of the souls of black Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. Demonstrating the importance of the work as a sociohistorical study of black life in America through the turn of the twentieth century and offering new ways of thinking about many of the topics introduced in Souls, Shaw charts Du Bois' successful appropriation of Hegelian idealism in order to add America, the nineteenth century, and black people to the historical narrative in Hegel's philosophy of history. Shaw adopts Du Bois' point of view to delve into the social, cultural, political, and intellectual milieus that helped to create The Souls of Black Folk.