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Cormac McCarthy told an interviewer for the New York Times Magazine that “books are made out of books,” but he has been famously unwilling to discuss how his own writing draws on the works of other writers. Yet his novels and plays masterfully appropriate and allude to an extensive range of literary works, demonstrating that McCarthy is well aware of literary tradition, respectful of the canon, and deliberately situating himself in a knowing relationship to precursors. The Wittliff Collection a...

Critical Essays on William Faulkner compiles scholarship by noted Faulkner studies scholar Robert W. Hamblin. Ranging from 1980 to 2020, the twenty-one essays present a variety of approaches to Faulkner's work. While acknowledging Faulkner as the quintessential southern writer-particularly in his treatment of race-the essays examine his work in relation to American and even international contexts. The volume includes discussions of Faulkner's techniques and the psychological underpinnings of bot...

The Chicago Renaissance has long been considered a less important literary movement for American modernism than the Harlem Renaissance. The Chicago Renaissance had its origin around the turn of the nineteenth century, from 1890 to 1910, gathered momentum in the 30s, and paved the way for the postmodern and postcolonial development in American literature even since. Yoshinobu Hakutani aims to shed light on this seldom studied, yet pivotal period, by studying some of it's most influential works an...

Still Modernism offers a critique of the modernist imperative to embrace motion, speed, and mobility. In the context of the rise of kinetic technologies and the invention of motion pictures, it claims that stillness is nonetheless an essential tactic of modernist innovation. More specifically, the book looks at the ways in which photographic stillness emerges as a counterpoint to motion and to film, asserting its own clear visibility against the blur of kinesis. Photographic stillness becomes a...

In contrast to later imperial pursuits in Mexico, Cuba, and the Philippines, the early United States extended its boundaries through less sensational modes of territorialization: land deals, slavery expansion, treaty diplomacy, immigration and settlement, and the addition of new states on the border. Never the exclusive top-down product of any single strategic plan, empire building relied rather on a hazy, ever-shifting boundary between state and non-state action. Territories of Empire examines...

Hailing from the small river town of Moundsville, West Virginia, Davis Grubb (1919-1980) became a key figure in the canon of Appalachian literature. The author of ten novels and dozens of short stories and radio plays, Grubb's writings, as Tom Douglass observes, "catalogued his life" - and a turbulent life it was, marked by the traumatic loss of both the family home and his father during the Great Depression, the overbearing affections of his mother, the fear of failure, painful struggles with a...

This book offers a consciously eclectic approach to the rich history of Pennsylvania in the period from 1740 to 1950. Combining original research with syntheses of relevant work by other historians, Pennsylvania Histories seeks to appeal to both professional historians and general readers by presenting a range of significant individuals, groups, and events that are likely to be less familiar to audiences interested in the history of Pennsylvania. The Moravians, for example, emerge as a denomin...

Mississippi has produced outstanding writers in numbers far out of proportion to its population. Their contributions to American literature, including poetry, rank as enormous. Mississippi Poets: A Literary Guide showcases forty-five poets associated with the state and assesses their work with the aim of appreciating it and its place in today's culture. In Mississippi, the importance of poetry can no longer be doubted. It partakes, as Faulkner wrote, of the broad aim of all literature: "to up...

Drawing from recent debates about the validity of regional studies and skepticism surrounding the efficacy of the concept of authenticity, Clare Chadd's Postregional Fictions focuses on questions of southern regional authenticity in fiction published by Barry Hannah from 1972 to 2001. The first monograph on the Mississippi author's work to appear since his death, this study considers the ways in which Hannah's novels and short stories challenge established conceptual understandings of the U.S. S...

L.A. Private Eyes examines the tradition of the private eye as it evolves in films, books, and television shows set in Los Angeles from the 1930's through the present day. It takes a closer look at narratives-both on screen and on the printed page-in which detectives travel the streets of Los Angeles, uncovering corruption, moral ambiguity, and greed with the conviction of urban cowboys, while always ultimately finding truth and redemption. With a review of Los Angeles history, crime stories, an...

New England Transcendentalism was a vibrant and many-sided movement whose members are probably best remembered for their utopian experiments, their attempts to reconcile the contingent world of history with what they perceived as the stable and patterned world of nature. Richard Francis has written the first book to explore in detail the ideological basis of the three famous experiments during the 1840s: Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Henry David Thoreau's "community of one" on the shores of Walden...

Winner of the 2018 Eudora Welty Prize. When the United States entered World War I, parts of the country had developed industries, urban cultures, and democratic political systems, but the South lagged behind, remaining an impoverished, agriculture region. Despite New South boosterism, the culture of the early twentieth-century South was comparatively artistically arid. Yet, southern writers dominated the literary marketplace by the 1920s and 1930s. World War I brought southerners into contact...

Acclaimed novelist, short story writer, and poet, David Huddle captivates us with a new collection. Not: A Trio is a sequence of three related stories that, taken together, form a unified work of fiction. This faceted approach is especially suited to a work that reveals the intricate connections among Danny Marlow, Claire McClelland, and Ben McClelland. Danny, Claire and Ben are thoughtful people who know each other well—yet hardly at all. Danny narrates the first story, introducing the rea...

An analysis of how nineteenth-century women regional writers represent political economic thought. Readers of late nineteenth-century female American authors are familiar with plots, characters, and households that make a virtue of economizing. Scholars often interpret these scenarios in terms of a mythos of parsimony, frequently accompanied by a sort of elegiac republicanism whereby self-sufficiency and autonomy are put to the service of the greater good - a counterworld to the actual econo...

The demise of the monarchy and the bodily absence of a King caused a representational crisis in the early republic, forcing the American people to reconstruct the social symbolic order in a new and unfamiliar way. Social historians have routinely understood the Revolution and the early republic as projects dedicated to and productive of reason, with "the people" as an orderly and sensible collective at odds with the volatile and unthinking crowd. American Enchantment rejects this traditionally h...