Literary Criticism
Personation Plots
Examines the fascination with identity fraud in sensation fiction and Victorian culture more broadly.
Dialogue on the Threshold
A reconstruction and critical interpretation of Heidegger's remarkable relationship with to the poet Georg Trakl.
Between Camp and Cursi
Examines how contemporary Mexican literature uses humor to contest heteronormativity.
Playing Games in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America
Illuminates the ways games—from baseball cards to board games, charades to boxing, and croquet to strategies of war—were integral to nineteenth-century life and culture in the United States and Britain.
Literature and Skepticism
Examines the skeptical foundations of literature in order to reassess the status of fiction.
Lives beyond Borders
Examines how contemporary US migrant women's life writing adapts autobiographical genres to call for social change benefiting minoritized communities.
Smooth Operating and Other Social Acts
An engaging homage to African American resilience and resourcefulness in US literature and culture.
Through the Periscope
Offers a wider approach to Italian American culture, one that stresses both its material, urban components and the creativity of its formal literary codes.
A Black Forest Walden
Compares life today in the German Black Forest with Thoreau's experiences at Walden Pond.
Tales from Du Bois
Offers a new framework for understanding Du Bois's poetics and politics, including the concept of double consciousness, by tracing the trope of the cross-caste romance across his fiction.
Engaging Italy
Traces literary and social connections among three American women navigating the changing political landscape of 1860s and '70s Italy.
Accumulation and Subjectivity
Reconsiders key concepts in Marxist thought by examining the relationship between accumulation and subjectivity in Latin American narrative, film, and social and political theory.
Portraits
Explores Elie Wiesel’s portraits of the sages of Judaism and elaborates on the Hasidic legacy from his life and his teaching.
Material Insurgency
Examines emerging new materialist and posthuman conceptions of subjectivity and agency, and explores their increasing significance for contemporary climate change environmentalism.
Premises and Problems
Discusses world literature and cinema from the perspective of literary languages and film traditions that do not hold a hegemonic position.
Sensitive Negotiations
Examines how Indigenous figures used British Romantic poetry in their interactions with settler governments and publics.
Hegel on Tragedy and Comedy
Explores the full extent of Hegel’s interest in tragedy and comedy throughout his works and extends from more literary and dramatic issues to questions about the role these genres play in the history of society and religion.
Avant-Gardes in Crisis
Charts underexamined genealogies of minoritarian aesthetic responses to the multiple crises of the long 1970s.
Flesh of My Flesh
Examines representations of sexual violence in modern Hebrew literature, focusing on the ways in which sexual aggression relates to Zionism, gender, ethnicity, and disability.
Poetics of Breathing
A comparative study of breath and breathing as a core poetic and compositional principle in modern literature.
Beyond Gold and Diamonds
The first book to examine and establish characteristics of the British South African novel.
Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene
Forges a fresh interpretation of Charlotte Brontë’s oeuvre as a response to ecological instability.
The World of Agha Shahid Ali
Critical essays on the transnational Kashmiri-American poet.
Death Rights
Analyzes how literary representations of suicide have reinforced antiblackness in the modern world.
Teardrops of Time
Investigates how the Thai poet Angkarn Kallayanapong adapts Buddhist concepts of time to create a modern Asian aesthetic imaginary.
Racialized Visions
The first volume in English to explore the cultural impact of Haiti on the surrounding Spanish-speaking nations of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico.
Creative Transformations
Explores the role of travel and translation in Brazilian literature and culture from the 1870s to the present.
The Blossom Which We Are
Charts the vicissitudes of a distinctly modern and peculiarly human vulnerability—our intimate dependence on the fragile, time-bound cultural framework that we inhabit—in the history of the realist novel.
Super Schoolmaster
Traces the controversial poet’s thinking about teaching and learning throughout his career.
The Play of Light
Juxtaposes five contemporary French poets, illuminating the philosophical elements of their work while making their sometimes difficult writing newly accessible.
Changed Forever, Volume II
The second volume of the first in-depth study of a range of literature written by Native Americans who attended government-run boarding schools.
Intersecting Diasporas
Examines literary expressions of allyship between Italian America and other diasporic communities in modern and contemporary US fiction.
Joan Didion
Explores how Didion's nonfiction prose style, often lauded for being beautiful and poetic, also works rhetorically.
The Awakening of Modern Japanese Fiction
Argues that the role of Buddhism in modern Japanese prose literature has been significantly overlooked.
Against the Despotism of Fact
First comprehensive account of the figure of the Irish Celt in modern British and Irish literature.
Medicine Is War
Examines how literature mediated a convergence of militarism and medicine in Victorian culture that continues into the present via a widespread martial metaphor.
Modernity as Exception and Miracle
Proposes "the extraordinary" as a defining characteristic of modernity.
The Space of Disappearance
Examines the evolution of disappearance as a formal narrative and epistemological phenomenon in late twentieth-century Argentine fiction.
Postcolonial Lack
Examines representations of surplus enjoyment in postcolonial literature and film to focus on self-other relations rather than difference.
A Permanent Beginning
Situates a Hasidic master in the context of his time, demonstrating his formative influence on Jewish literary modernity.
Black Cultural Mythology
Offers a new conceptual framework rooted in mythological analysis to ground the field of Africana cultural memory studies.
DIY on the Lower East Side
Engaging look at Lower East Side writers and artists in the wake of the 1975 New York fiscal crisis.
Kept from All Contagion
Highlights connections between authors rarely studied together by exposing their shared counternarratives to germ theory's implicit suggestion of protection in isolation.
Announcements
A study of novelty through analyses of the language of announcement in revolutionary texts.
Victorian Structures
Argues that the descriptions of buildings frequently encountered in Victorian novels offer more than evocative settings for characters and plot; instead, such descriptions signal these novels' self-reflexive consideration of the structure itself.
The Autobiography of a Language
Explores the links between language, cultural identity, and creativity through the works of Emanuel Carnevali, one of the first Italian American authors to attain literary recognition.
Victorian Negatives
Argues that the photographic negative gives a new way of understanding Victorian debates surrounding origins and copies as well as reality and representation.
Argentine Intimacies
Revisits a foundational moment in Argentine history to demonstrate how the crisis of modernity opened up new possibilities for imagining kinship otherwise.
Forms of Disappointment
Analyzes parallel developments in post–Cold War literature and film from Cuba and Angola to trace a shared history of revolutionary enthusiasm, disappointment, and solidarity.
Romantic Vacancy
Examines the concept of a poetics of vacancy in Romantic-era literature.
The Struggle for Understanding
An in-depth look at Elie Wiesel’s writings, from his earliest works to his final novels.
Reconciling Nature
Reveals how classic American novels embodied the tensions embedded in American views of the natural world from the Centennial until the end of the Second World War.
Cub Reporters
Investigates how depictions of young people in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America use artifice to destabilize pre-existing narratives of truth, news, and fact.
Authorized Agents
Examines the relation between Indian diplomacy and nineteenth-century Native American literature.
An Ethic of Innocence
Offers a feminist theory of ignorance that sheds light on the misunderstood or overlooked epistemic practices of women in literature.
Legacies of the Sublime
Pairs literary works with philosophical and theoretical texts to examine how the Kantian sublime influenced authors in their treatments of freedom and subjectivity through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Emerson in Iran
Examines the impact of Persian poetry in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Argentina Noir
An engaging and insightful guide to Argentine crime fiction since 2000.
The Aesthetics of Senescence
Investigates how nineteenth-century British literature grappled with a new understanding of aging as both an individual and collective experience.
The Infrahuman
Argues that Jewish writers used depictions of Jews as animals to question prevalent notions of Jewish identity.
Signatures of Struggle
A Marxist history of Israeli literature, tracing the relations between economic, social, and aesthetic transformations.
New Directions in Jewish American and Holocaust Literatures
Surveys the current state of Jewish American and Holocaust literatures as well as approaches to teaching them.
Recovering Lost Footprints, Volume 2
Analyzes contemporary Yucatecan and Chiapanecan Maya narratives.
Queer Expectations
Examines how Jewish women have used poetry to challenge their historical limitations while rewriting their potential futures.
Troubled Memories
Analyzes literary and cultural representations of iconic Mexican women to explore how these reimaginings can undermine or perpetuate gender norms in contemporary Mexico.
Fashion, Modernity, and Materiality in France
An interdisciplinary examination of French fashion, modernity, and materiality from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries.
Writing the Talking Cure
Explores Yalom’s profound contributions to psychotherapy and literature.
Animating Black and Brown Liberation
Offers a new framework for reading American literatures that critically links African American and Latinx traditions and struggles for liberation.
Reading for the Moral
Reassesses didacticism in seventeenth-century Chinese vernacular fiction and challenges the view that the late Ming was a notoriously immoral time.
Multicultural Poetics
Argues that multiculturalism and hybridity are key components of the nation’s poetry and its culture.
Echoes of a Queer Messianic
Reconsiders mostly German narratives from around 1800 to recover echoes of a queer messianic that still resonate today.
Storytelling
An innovative philosophical meditation on the muteness of Holocaust survivors and the human faculty of storytelling.
States of Grace
Provides in-depth analyses of key moments in Brazilian utopianism, including theologico-political, matriarchal, environmental, and work-free utopias.
Anti-Music
Examines how African American jazz music was received in Germany both as a racial and cultural threat and as a partner in promoting the rise of Nazi totalitarian cultural politics.
Fire and Snow
A broad examination of climate fantasy and science fiction, from The Lord of the Rings and the Narnia series to The Handmaid's Tale and Game of Thrones.
Changed Forever, Volume I
The first in-depth study of a range of literature written by Native Americans who attended government-run boarding schools.
Our War Paint Is Writers' Ink
Explores a little-known history of exchange between Anishinaabe and American writers, showing how literature has long been an important venue for debates over settler colonial policy and indigenous rights.
Figures of Time
Focuses on how nuances of poetic form alter how we have come to understand cultural aspects of time.
Jane Austen's Women
An original critical introduction to women characters in the novels of Jane Austen.
Bootlegger of the Soul
A celebration of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist who put Albany on the world’s literary map.
The Afterlife of al-Andalus
The first study to undertake a wide-ranging comparison of invocations of al-Andalus across the the Arab and Hispanic worlds.
College Bound
Argues that first- and second-generation Jewish American writers had an ambivalent relationship with educational success.
Coming Too Late
Rethinks the significance of the son’s relationship to his father for Freud’s psychoanalytic theory.
Recovering Lost Footprints, Volume 1
Analyzes contemporary Maya narratives.
Poetics and Precarity
Poets and critics address the potential of language to address the increasing level of discord and precarity in the twenty-first century.
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's Phrase
First sustained critical reading of Lacoue-Labarthe's Phrase, which provides insights into a philosophically inspired work of prose poetry.
Witnessing beyond the Human
Provides an innovative and theoretically rigorous approach to the subject of testimony in Latin America.
The World, the Text, and the Indian
Advances critical conversations in Native American literary studies by situating its subject in global, transnational, and modernizing contexts.
The Love of Ruins
Explores issues related to race and religion in Lovecraft criticism.
Beasts of Burden
Uses literature, art, and cultural texts from the British Romantic period to explore the age in which biological life and its abilities first became regulated by the rising nation.
Dark Affinities, Dark Imaginaries
A story of self, braided to a story of American culture.
Romantic Mediations
Investigates the ways in which new technologies and theories of photography, phonography, moving images, and digital media engage with a diverse set of texts by British Romantic writers.
Rhetorical Healing
Reveals the rhetorical strategies African American writers have used to promote Black women’s recovery and wellness through educational and entertainment genres and the conservative gender politics that are distributed when these efforts are sold for public consumption.
Literature and "Interregnum"
Examines literary responses to the impact of economic and technological globalization in Latin America.
Malady and Genius
Analyzes the theme of self-sacrifice in Puerto Rican literature through psychoanalytic theory.
Freedom from the Free Will
Brings Kafka’s fiction into conversation with philosophy and political theory.
Radical Poetry
Engages in a critical reanalysis of historical Ibero-American experimental poetry in order to demonstrate how the contemporary digital vanguard owes much to this tradition.
Oscillations of Literary Theory
Revises key psychoanalytic concepts that influence interpretive practices in the humanities and formulates a new approach to reading fiction.
Libre Acceso
Analyzes the diverse roles and pervasive presence of disability in Latin American literature and film.
Writing Widowhood
Explores how memoirs of widowhood can help us understand the reality of bereavement and the critical role of writing and reading in recovery.