In the early 1800s, American critics warned about the danger of literature as a distraction from reality. Later critical accounts held that American literature during the antebellum period was idealistic and that literature grew more realistic after the horrors of the Civil War. By focusing on three leading American authors Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson Reading Reality challenges that analysis. Thomas Finan reveals how antebellum authors used words such as ""real"" and ""reality"" as key terms for literary discourse and claimed that the ""real"" was, in fact, central to their literary enterprise. He argues that for many Americans in the early nineteenth century, the ""real"" was often not synonymous with the physical world. It could refer to the spiritual, the sincere, or the individual's experience. He further explains how this awareness revises our understanding of the literary and conceptual strategies of American writers. By unpacking antebellum senses of the ""real,"" Finan casts new light on the formal traits of the period's literature, the pressures of the literary marketplace in nineteenth-century America, and the surprising possibilities of literary reading.

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 1982.

Surveying the widespread appropriations of the Gothic in contemporary literature and culture, Post-Millennial Gothic shows contemporary Gothic is often romantic, funny and celebratory. Reading a wide range of popular texts, from Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series through Tim Burton's Gothic film adaptations of Sweeney Todd, Alice in Wonderland and Dark Shadows, to the appearance of Gothic in fashion, advertising and television, Catherine Spooner argues that conventional academic and media accounts of Gothic culture have overlooked this celebratory strain of 'Happy Gothic'. Identifying a shift in subcultural sensibilities following media coverage of the Columbine shootings, Spooner suggests that changing perceptions of Goth subculture have shaped the development of twenty-first century Gothic. Reading these contemporary trends back into their sources, Spooner also explores how they serve to highlight previously neglected strands of comedy and romance in earlier Gothic literature.

Throughout the early modern period, the nymph remained a powerful figure that inspired and informed the cultural imagination in many different ways. Far from being merely a symbol of the classical legacy, the nymph was invested with a surprisingly broad range of meanings. Working on the basis of these assumptions, and thus challenging Aby Warburg's famous reflections on the nympha that both portrayed her as cultural archetype and reduced her to a marginal figure, the contributions in this volume seek to uncover the multifarious roles played by nymphs in literature, drama, music, the visual arts, garden architecture, and indeed intellectual culture tout court, and thereby explore the true significance of this well-known figure for the early modern age. Contributors: Barbara Baert, Mira Becker-Sawatzky, Agata Anna Chrzanowska, Karl Enenkel, Wolfgang Fuhrmann, Michaela Kaufmann, Andreas Keller, Eva-Bettina Krems, Damaris Leimgruber, Tobias Leuker, Christian Peters, Christoph Pieper, Bernd Roling, and Anita Traninger.

Australian Fiction as Archival Salvage examines key developments in the field of the Australian postcolonial historical novel from 1989 to the present. In parallel with this analysis, A. Frances Johnson undertakes a unique study of in-kind creativity, reflecting on how her own nascent historical fiction has been critically and imaginatively shaped and inspired by seminal experiments in the genre - by writers as diverse as Kate Grenville, Mudrooroo, Kim Scott, Peter Carey, Richard Flanagan, and Rohan Wilson. Mapping the postcolonial novel against the impact of postcolonial cultural theory and Australian writers' intermittent embrace of literary postmodernism, this survey is also read against the post-millenial 'history' and 'culture wars' which saw politicizations of national debates around history and fierce contestation over the ways stories of Australian pasts have been written.

Early African Caribbean Newspapers as Archipelagic Media in the Emancipation Age shows how two Black-edited periodical publications in the early decades of the nineteenth century worked towards emancipation through medium-specific interventions across material and immaterial lines. More concretely, this book proposes an archipelagic framework for understanding the emancipatory struggles of the Antiguan Weekly Register in St. John's and the Jamaica Watchman in Kingston. Complicating the prevalent narrative about the Register and the Watchman as organs of the free people of color, this book continues to explore the heterogeneity and evolution of Black newspaper print on the liberal spectrum. As such, Early African Caribbean Newspapers makes the case that the Register and the Watchman participated in shaping the contemporary communication market in the Caribbean. To do so, this study engages deeply with both the textuality and materiality of the newspaper and presents fresh visual material.

'Retro' is not only a pervading phenomenon in today's Western culture but has informed cultural history for some centuries and thus gives momentousness to the subject of the present volume, namely literary texts and musical compositions which, for various reasons and with multiple functions, 'make it old'.

In these three studies, hinging on an unusual theme, Roger Sale examines three very different writers: an impassioned novelist, a wry and witty literary critic, and a donnish teller of apparently old-fashioned romances that have achieved a cult following today. Many people assume that heroism is dead because the heroic styles of past ages no longer exist. Roger Sale contends that this assumption is accompanied by other beliefs that are part of what he calls the Myth of Lost Unity (a variation on the myth of the Golden Age): a sense that the world was once "whole" but in recent centuries has gradually disintegrated; a feeling that the human condition is now lost or alienated or drifting; and a conviction that the proper response to life is resignation, cynicism, or despair. Sale reminds us that Lawrence, Empson, and Tolkien all came to believe in the major features of the Myth of Lost Unity. Each, however, replied to what seemed his-and our fate-and defied the implications of the myth, achieving a community as a badge of that defiance. Sale's exploration of their separate merits reveals how their heroism made them alike. The strength of Modern Heroism lies in the formidable critical powers Sale exercises in his three variations on its theme. 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 1973.