From the 1950s to the 1970s, the idea of independence inspired radical changes across the French-speaking world. In The Quebec Connection, Julie-Francoise Tolliver examines the links and parallels that writers from Quebec, the Caribbean, and Africa imagined to unite that world, illuminating the tropes they used to articulate solidarities across the race and class differences that marked their experience. Tolliver argues that the French tongue both enabled and delimited connections between these writers, restricting their potential with the language's own imperial history. The literary map that emerges demonstrates the plurality of French-language literatures, going beyond the concept of a single, unitary francophone literature to appreciate the profuse range of imaginaries connected by solidary texts that hoped for transformative independence.Importantly, the book expands the "francophone" framework by connecting African and Caribbean literatures to Quebecois literature, attending to their interactions while recognizing their particularities. The Quebec Connection's analysis of transnational francophone solidarities radically alters the field of francophone studies by redressing the racial logic that isolates the northern province from what has come to be called the postcolonial world.

This book is about what does not happen in the Victorian novel. The description may sound absurd, yet consideration of alternatives to a given state of affairs is crucial to our understanding of a novel. Plot emerges out of the gradual elimination of possibilities, from the revelation, on the first page of a work, that we are in nineteenth-century London and not sixteenth-century Paris, to the final disclosure that Pip returns home too late to marry Biddy but is now free to pursue his lost love Estella. Through careful examination of the plots of such classics as Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, Charlotte Bronte's Villette, Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Henry James's The Ambassadors, Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, and others, Glatt argues for the central role of these "unwritten plots" in Victorian narrative construction. Abandoning the allegorical mode-in which characters are bound by fixed identities to reach a predetermined conclusion-and turning away from classical and historical plots with outcomes already known to audiences, the realist novel of the Victorian era was designed to simulate the openness and uncertainty of ordinary human experience. We are invested in these stories of David Copperfield or Elizabeth Bennet or Lucy Snowe in part because we cannot be entirely sure how those stories will end. As Glatt demonstrates, the Victorian novel is characterized by a proliferation of possibilities.

Who has the right to decide how nature is used, and in what ways? Recovering an overlooked thread of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century environmental thought, Erin Drew shows that English writers of the period commonly believed that human beings had only the "usufruct" of the earth the "right of temporary possession, use, or enjoyment of the advantages of property belonging to another, so far as may be had without causing damage or prejudice." The belief that human beings had only temporary and accountable possession of the world, which Drew labels the ""usufructuary ethos,"" had profound ethical implications for the ways in which the English conceived of the ethics of power and use. Drew's book traces the usufructuary ethos from the religious and legal writings of the seventeenth century through mid-eighteenth-century poems of colonial commerce, attending to the particular political, economic, and environmental pressures that shaped, transformed, and ultimately sidelined it. Although a study of past ideas, The Usufructuary Ethos resonates with contemporary debates about our human responsibilities to the natural world in the face of climate change and mass extinction.

As a socialist monarchist, Jewish Catholic, skeptical mystic, and humorous sage, Roth has never fitted neatly into any one literary or historical category. The essays in this volume, devoted to the Austrian writer Joseph Roth on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his death in Paris in 1939, take a fresh look at his apparent contradictions and demonstrate his contemporary relevance as an acute analyst of the relationship between private life and political change.

Contributions by Frederick Luis Aldama, Melissa Burgess, Susan Kirtley, Rachel Luria, Ursula Murray Husted, Mark O'Connor, Allan Pero, Davida Pines, Tara Prescott-Johnson, Jane Tolmie, Rachel Trousdale, Elaine Claire Villacorta, and Glenn Willmott Lynda Barry (b. 1956) is best known for her distinctive style and unique voice, first popularized in her underground weekly comic Ernie Pook's Comeek. Since then, she has published prolifically, including numerous comics, illustrated novels, and nonfiction books exploring the creative process. Barry's work is genre- and form-bending, often using collage to create what she calls "word with drawing" vignettes. Her art, imaginative and self-reflective, allows her to discuss gender, race, relationships, memory, and her personal, everyday lived experience. It is through this experience that Barry examines the creative process and offers to readers ways to record and examine their own lives. The essays in Contagious Imagination: The Work and Art of Lynda Barry, edited by Jane Tolmie, study the pedagogy of Barry's work and its application academically and practically. Examining Barry's career and work from the point of view of research-creation, Contagious Imagination applies Barry's unique mixture of teaching, art, learning, and creativity to the very form of the volume, exploring Barry's imaginative praxis and offering readers their own. With a foreword by Frederick Luis Aldama and an afterword by Glenn Willmott, this volume explores the impact of Barry's work in and out of the classroom. Divided into four sections-Teaching and Learning, which focuses on critical pedagogy; Comics and Autobiography, which targets various practices of rememorying; Cruddy, a self-explanatory category that offers two extraordinary critical interventions into Barry criticism around a challenging text; and Research-Creation, which offers two creative, synthetic artistic pieces that embody and enact Barry's own mixed academic and creative investments-this book offers numerous inroads into Barry's idiosyncratic imagination and what it can teach us about ourselves.

Serial Mexico responds to a continued need to historicize and contextualize seriality, particularly as it exists outside of dominant U.S./European contexts. In Mexico, serialization has been an important feature of narrative since the birth of the nation. Amy Wright's exploration begins with a study of novels serialized in pamphlets and newspapers by key Mexican authors of the nineteenth century, showing that serialization was essential to the development of both the novel and national identities-to Mexican popular culture-during its foundational period. In the twentieth century, a technological explosion after the Mexican Revolution (1910-20) set Mexico's transmedial wheels into motion, as a variety of media recycled and repurposed earlier serialized tales, themselves drawn from a repertoire of oral traditions to national nostalgic effect. Along the way, Serial Mexico responds to the following series of questions: How has serialized storytelling functioned in Mexico? How can we better understand the relationship of seriality to transmediality through this historical case study? Which stories (characters, themes, storylines, and storyworlds) have circulated repeatedly over time? How have those stories defined Mexico? The goal of this book is to begin to understand some of the possible answers to these questions through five case studies, which highlight five key artifacts, in five different media, at five different historical points spanning nearly two hundred years of Mexico's history. Serial Mexico offers important insights into not only the topic of serialized storytelling, but to larger notions of how national identities are created through narrative, with crucial cultural and sometimes political implications.

Driven to the Field traces the culture of sharecropping-crucial to understanding life in the southern United States-from Emancipation to the twenty-first century. By reading dozens of works of literature in their historical context, David A. Davis demonstrates how sharecropping emerged, endured for a century, and continues to resonate in American culture. Following the end of slavery, sharecropping initially served as an expedient solution to a practical problem, but it quickly developed into an entrenched power structure situated between slavery and freedom that exploited the labor of Blacks and poor whites to produce agricultural commodities. Sharecropping was the economic linchpin in the South's social structure, and the region's political system, race relations, and cultural practices were inextricably linked with this peculiar form of tenant farming from the end of the Civil War through the civil rights movement. Driven to the Field analyzes literary portrayals of this system to explain how it defined the culture of the South, revealing multiple genres of literature that depicted sharecropping, such as cotton romances, agricultural uplift novels, proletarian sharecropper fiction, and sharecropper autobiographies-important works of American literature that have never before been evaluated and discussed in their proper context.

According to George Jackson, black men born in the US are conditioned to accept the inevitability of being imprisoned.... Being born a slave in a captive society and never experiencing any objective basis for expectation had the effect of preparing me for the progressively traumatic misfortune that led so many black men to the prison gate. I was prepared for prison. It required only minor psychic adjustments. As Jackson writes from his prison cell, his statement may seem to be only a product of his current status. However, history proves his point. Indeed, some of the most well-known and respected black men have served time in jail or prison. Among them are Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, and Frederick Douglass. This book is an examination of the various forms that imprisonment, as asocial, historical, and political experience of African Americans, has taken. Confinement describes the status of individuals who are placed within boundaries either seen or unseen but always felt. A word that suggests extensive implications, confinement describes the status of persons who are imprisoned and who are unjustly relegated to a social status that is hostile, rendering them powerless and subject to the rules of the authorities. Arguably, confinement appropriately describes the status of African Americans who have endured spaces of confinement, which include, but are not limited to plantations, Jim Crow societies, and prisons. At specific times, these spaces of confinement have been used to oppress African Americans socially, politically, and spiritually. Contributors examine the related experiences of Malcolm X, Bigger Thomas of Native Son, and Angela Davis.

In contrast to other literary genres, drama has received little attention in southern studies, and women playwrights in general receive less recognition than their male counterparts. In Marginalized: Southern Women Playwrights Confront Race, Region, and Gender, author Casey Kayser addresses these gaps by examining the work of southern women playwrights, making the argument that representations of the American South on stage are complicated by difficulties of identity, genre, and region. Through analysis of the dramatic texts, the rhetoric of reviews of productions, as well as what the playwrights themselves have said about their plays and productions, Kayser delineates these challenges and argues that playwrights draw on various conscious strategies in response. These strategies, evident in the work of such playwrights as Pearl Cleage, Sandra Deer, Lillian Hellman, Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, and Shay Youngblood, provide them with the opportunity to lead audiences to reconsider monolithic understandings of northern and southern regions and, ultimately, create new visions of the South.

In Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture, author Stefanie K. Dunning considers both popular and literary texts that range from Beyonce's Lemonade to Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones. These key works restage Black women in relation to nature. Dunning argues that depictions of protagonists who return to pastoral settings contest the violent and racist history that incentivized Black disavowal of the natural world. Dunning offers an original theoretical paradigm for thinking through race and nature by showing that diverse constructions of nature in these texts are deployed as a means of rescrambling the teleology of the Western progress narrative. In a series of fascinating close readings of contemporary Black texts, she reveals how a range of artists evoke nature to suggest that interbeing with nature signals a call for what Jared Sexton calls ""the dream of Black Studies""-abolition. Black to Nature thus offers nuanced readings that advance an emerging body of critical and creative work at the nexus of Blackness, gender, and nature. Written in a clear, approachable, and multilayered style that aims to be as poignant as nature itself, the volume offers a unique combination of theoretical breadth, narrative beauty, and broader perspective that suggests it will be a foundational text in a new critical turn towards framing nature within a cultural studies context.

Contributions by Jacob Agner, Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Katie Berry Frye, Michael Kreyling, Andrew B. Leiter, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne Marrs, Tom Nolan, Michael Pickard, Harriet Pollack, and Victoria Richard Eudora Welty's ingenious play with readers' expectations made her a cunning writer, a paramount modernist, a short story artist of the first rank, and a remarkable literary innovator. In her signature puzzle-texts, she habitually engages with familiar genres and then delights readers with her transformations and nonfulfillment of conventions. Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden in Plain Sight reveals how often that play is with mystery, crime, and detective fiction genres, popular fiction forms often condescended to in literary studies, but unabashedly beloved by Welty throughout her lifetime. Put another way, Welty often creates her stories' secrets by both evoking and displacing crime fiction conventions. Instead of restoring order with a culminating reveal, her story-puzzles characteristically allow mystery to linger and thicken. The mystery pursued becomes mystery elsewhere. The essays in this collection shift attention from narratives, characters, and plots as they have previously been understood by unearthing enigmas hidden within those constructions. Some of these new readings continue Welty's investigation of hegemonic whiteness and southern narratives of race-outlining these in chalk as outright crime stories. Other essays show how Welty anticipated the regendering of the form now so characteristic of contemporary women mystery writers. Her tender and widely ranging personal correspondence with the hard-boiled American crime writer Ross Macdonald is also discussed. Together these essays make the case that across her career, Eudora Welty was arguably one of the genre's greatest double agents, and, to apply the titles of Macdonald's novels to her inventiveness with the form, she is its "underground woman," its unexpected "sleeping beauty.

While memory is one of the most fascinating faculties of consciousness, it is also one of the most mysterious. Is it memory-our own marvelous personal computer or data base-that brings us the intense feelings prompted by a certain object or situation? Drawing on an expansive array of sources, from microbiology to cosmology, Ovid to Proust, Egyptology to the cinema, Philip Kuberski leads us on a brave and beguiling exploration of memory. He enables us to see it as a worldly process in which individuals both remember and are remembered, all in a network of associations that join our bodies, personal and cultural myths, and aesthetic and literary experiences. His essays will provide a tantalizing and thoughtful read for those interested in literature, psychology, biology, anthropology, and philosophy. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.

It's been barely twenty years since Dave Eggers (b. 1970) burst onto the American literary scene with the publication of his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. In that time, he has gone on to publish several books of fiction, a few more books of nonfiction, a dozen books for children, and many harder-to-classify works. In addition to his authorship, Eggers has established himself as an influential publisher, editor, and designer. He has also founded a publishing company, McSweeney's; two magazines, Might and McSweeney's Quarterly Concern; and several nonprofit organizations. This whirlwind of productivity, within publishing and beyond, gives Eggers a unique standing among American writers: jack of all trades, master of same. The interviews contained in Conversations with Dave Eggers suggest the range of Eggers's pursuits-a range that is reflected in the variety of the interviews themselves. In addition to the expected interviews with major publications, Eggers engages here with obscure magazines and blogs, trade publications, international publications, student publications, and children from a mentoring program run by one of his nonprofits. To read the interviews in sequence is to witness Eggers's rapid evolution. The cultural hysteria around Staggering Genius and Eggers's complicated relationship with celebrity are clear in many of the earlier interviews. From there, as the buzz around him mellows, Eggers responds in kind, allowing writing and his other endeavors to come to the fore of his conversations. Together, these interviews provide valuable insight into a driving force in contemporary American literature.

Toward the end of his career, Robert Penn Warren wrote, "It may be said that our lives are our own supreme fiction." Although lauded for his writing in multiple genres, Warren never wrote an autobiography. Instead, he created his own "shadowy autobiography" in his poetry and prose, as well as his fiction and nonfiction. As one of the most thoughtful scholars on Robert Penn Warren and the literature of the South, Joseph Millichap builds on the accepted idea that Warren's poetry and fiction became more autobiographical in his later years by demonstrating that that same progression is replicated in Warren's literary criticism. This meticulously researched study reexamines in particular Warren's later nonfiction in which autobiographical concerns come into play-that is, in those fraught with psychological crisis such as Democracy and Poetry. Millichap reveals the interrelated literary genres of autobiography, criticism, and poetry as psychological modes encompassing the interplay of Warren's life and work in his later nonfiction. He also shows how Warren's critical engagement with major American authors often centered on the ways their creative work intersected with their lives, thus generating both autobiographical criticism and the working out of Warren's own autobiography under these influences. Millichap's latest book focuses on Warren's critical responses to William Faulkner, John Crowe Ransom, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Theodore Dreiser. In addition, the author carefully considers the black and female writers Warren assessed more briefly in American Literature: The Makers and the Making. Robert Penn Warren, Shadowy Autobiography, and Other Makers of American Literature presents the breadth of Millichap's scholarship, the depth of his insight, and the maturity of his judgment, by giving us to understand that in his writing, Robert Penn Warren came to know his own vocation as a poet and critic-and as an American.