James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) exemplified the ideal of the American public intellectual as a writer, educator, songwriter, diplomat, key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and first African American executive of the NAACP. Originally published anonymously in 1912, Johnson's novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is considered one of the foundational works of twentieth-century African American literature, and its themes and forms have been taken up by other writers, from Ralph Ellison to Teju Cole. Johnson's novel provocatively engages with political and cultural strains still prevalent in American discourse today, and it remains in print over a century after its initial publication. New Perspectives contains fresh essays that analyze the book's reverberations, the contexts within which it was created and received, the aesthetic and intellectual developments of its author, and its continuing influence on American literature and global culture.

In Imaginary Empires, Maria O'Malley examines early American texts published between 1767 and 1867 whose narratives represent women's engagement in the formation of empire. Her analysis unearths a variety of responses to contact, exchange, and cohabitation in the early United States, stressing the possibilities inherent in the literary to foster participation, resignification, and rapprochement. New readings of The Female American, Leonora Sansay's Secret History, Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie, Lydia Maria Child's A Romance of the Republic, and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl confound the metaphors of ghosts, haunting, and amnesia that proliferate in many recent studies of early US literary history. Instead, as O'Malley shows, these writings foreground acts of foundational violence involved in the militarization of domestic spaces, the legal impediments to the transfer of property and wealth, and the geopolitical standing of the United States. Racialized and gendered figures in the texts refuse to die, leave, or stay silent. In imagining different kinds of futures, these writers reckon with the ambivalent role of women in empire-building as they negotiate between their own subordinate position in society and their exertion of sovereignty over others. By tracing a thread of virtual history found in works by women, Imaginary Empires explores how reflections of the past offer a means of shaping future sociopolitical formations.

Over a period of three years, Henry David Thoreau made three trips to the largely unexplored woods of Maine. He scaled peaks, paddled a canoe, and dined on hemlock tea and moose lips. Taking notes, he acutely observed the rich flora and fauna, as well as the few people he met dotting the landscape, like lumberers, boat-men, and the Abnaki Indians. - The Maine Woods is an American classic, a voyage into nature and the heart of early America.

Conversations with Colum McCann brings together eighteen interviews with a world-renowned fiction writer. Ranging from his 1994 literary debut, Fishing the Sloe-Black River, to a new and unpublished interview conducted in 2016, these interviews represent the development as well as the continuation of McCann's interests. The number and length of the later conversations attest to his star-power. Let the Great World Spin earned him the National Book Award and promises to become a major motion picture. His most recent novel, TransAtlantic, has awed readers with its dynamic yoking of the 1845-46 visit of Frederick Douglass to Ireland, the 1919 first nonstop transatlantic flight of Alcock and Brown, and Senator George Mitchell's 1998 efforts to achieve a peace accord inNorthern Ireland. An extensive interview by scholar Cecile Maudet is included here, as is an interview by John Cusatis, who wrote Understanding Colum McCann, the first extensive critical analysisof McCann's work. An author who actually enjoys talking about his work, McCann (b. 1965) offers insights into his method of writing, what he hopes to achieve, as well the challenge of writing each novel to go beyond his accomplishments in the novel before. Readers will note how many of his responses include stories in which hehimself is the object of the humor and how often his remarks reveal insights into his character as a man who sees the grittiness of the urban landscape but never loses faith in the strength of ordinary people and their capacity to prevail.

This book is the final volume of a four-volume set on modern Chinese complex sentences, assessing the key attributes, related sentence structures, and semantic and pragmatic relevance of complex sentences. Complex sentences in modern Chinese are unique in formation and meaning. Following on from analysis on coordinate, causal, and adversative types of complex sentences, the ten chapters in this volume review the characteristics of complex sentences as a whole. The author discusses the constituents, related structures, semantic and pragmatic aspects of complex sentences, covering topics such !!as the constraints and counter-constraints between sentence forms and semantic relationships, six type crossover markers, distinctions between simple sentences and complex sentences, clauses formed by a noun/nominal phrase followed by le, the shi structure, subject ellipsis or tacit understanding of clauses, as well as double-subject sentences, alternative question groups and their relationships with complex sentences. The book will be a useful reference for scholars and learners of the Chinese language interested in Chinese grammar and language information processing.