Academic : Literature : American literature : By period

This anthology brings together a wide variety of both well-known and more obscure writing from and about the Civil War, along with supplementary appendices to facilitate use in courses. The writing includes short fiction, poetry, public addresses, diary entries, song lyrics, and essays from such figures as Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane, and Louisa May Alcott, as well as Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Jefferson Davis, and Ulysses S. Grant. The writing not only includes those directly involved in the war, but also those writing about the war afterward, to include the perspective of historical memory. This collection makes the perfect addition to any course on the Civil War or history and popular memory. more...

Price: $39.95

Considers the fascination with the free market and the economic world evident within postwar literature. more...

Price: $68.00

Explores the relationship between copyright laws and women’s writing in nineteenth-century America. more...

Price: $60.00

The post-Darwinian theory of atavism forecasted obstacles to human progress in the reappearance of throwback physical or cultural traits after several generations of absence. In this original and stimulating work, Dana Seitler explores the ways in which modernity itself is an atavism, shaping a historical and theoretical account of its dramatic rise and impact on Western culture and imagination. Examining late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century science, fiction, and photography, Seitler discovers how modern thought oriented itself around this paradigm of obsolescence and return—one that served to sustain ideologies of gender, sexuality, and race. She argues that atavism was not only a discourse of violence—mapping racial and sexual divisions onto the boundary between human and animal—but was also an illustration of how modern science understood human being as a temporal category. On one hand, atavism positioned some humans as more advanced than others on an evolutionary scale. On the other, it undermined such progressivism by suggesting that because all humans had evolved from animals they were therefore not purely human. Atavism thus reveals how scientific theories of a recurrent past were a significant feature of modernity. At the beginning of the twentieth century, atavistic theory had widespread social and economic effects on the taxonomies of medicine, the logic of the welfare state, conceptions of the modern family, and images of the abnormal. Investigating the cultural logic of science in conjunction with naturalist, feminist, and popular narratives, Seitler exposes the influence of atavism: a fundamental shift in ways of knowing—and telling stories about—the modern human. more...

Price: $67.50

An engaging introduction to the life and works of the author of The Scarlet Letter. more...

Price: $16.00