In 1940, Hans Augusto Rey and Margret Rey built two bikes, packed what they could, and fled wartime Paris. Among the possessions they escaped with was a manuscript that would later become one of the most celebrated books in children's literature-Curious George. Since his debut in 1941, the mischievous icon has only grown in popularity. After being captured in Africa by the Man in the Yellow Hat and taken to live in the big city's zoo, Curious George became a symbol of curiosity, adventure, and exploration. In Curious about George: Curious George, Cultural Icons, Colonialism, and US Exceptionalism, author Rae Lynn Schwartz-DuPre argues that the beloved character also performs within a narrative of racism, colonialism, and heroism. Using theories of colonial and rhetorical studies to explain why cultural icons like Curious George are able to avoid criticism, Schwartz-DuPre investigates the ways these characters operate as capacious figures, embodying and circulating the narratives that construct them, and effectively argues that discourses about George provide a rich training ground for children to learn US citizenship and become innocent supporters of colonial American exceptionalism. By drawing on postcolonial theory, children's criticisms, science and technology studies, and nostalgia, Schwartz-DuPre's critical reading explains the dismissal of the monkey's 1941 abduction from Africa and enslavement in the US, described in the first book, by illuminating two powerful roles he currently holds: essential STEM ambassador at a time when science and technology is central to global competitiveness and as a World War II refugee who offers a "deficient" version of the Holocaust while performing model US immigrant. Curious George's twin heroic roles highlight racist science and an Americanized Holocaust narrative. By situating George as a representation of enslaved Africans and Holocaust refugees, Curious about George illuminates the danger of contemporary zero-sum identity politics, the colonization of marginalized identities, and racist knowledge production. Importantly, it demonstrates the ways in which popular culture can be harnessed both to promote colonial benevolence and to present possibilities for resistance.

Joan Didion (b. 1934) is an American icon. Her essays, particularly those in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, have resonated in American culture to a degree unmatched over the past half century. Two generations of writers have taken her as the measure of what it means to write personal essays. No one writes about California, the sixties, media narratives, cultural mythology, or migraines without taking Didion into account. She has also written five novels; several screenplays with her husband, John Gregory Dunne; and three late-in-life memoirs, including The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, which have brought her a new wave of renown. Conversations with Joan Didion features seventeen interviews with the author spanning decades, continents, and genres. Didion reflects on her childhood in Sacramento; her time at Berkeley (both as a student and later as a visiting professor), New York, and Hollywood; her marriage to Dunne; and of course her writing. Didion describes her methods of writing, the ways in which the various genres she has worked in inform one another, and the concerns that have motivated her to write.

Lexicon Urthus is an alphabetical dictionary for the complete Urth Cycle by Gene Wolfe: The Shadow of the Torturer; The Claw of the Conciliator; The Sword of the Lictor; The Citadel of the Autarch; the sequel Urth of the New Sun; the novella Empires of Foliage and Flower; the short stories "The Cat," "The Map," and "The Old Woman Whose Rolling Pin Is the Sun"; and Gene Wolfe's own commentaries in The Castle of the Otter. The first edition was nominated for a World Fantasy Award. This second edition includes over 1,200 entries. When the first edition was published, Science Fiction Age said: "Lexicon Urthus makes a perfect gift for any fan of [Wolfe's] work, and from the way his words sell, it appears that there are many deserving readers out there waiting." Gary K. Wolfe, in Locus, said: "A convenient and well researched glossary of names and terms. . . . It provides enough of a gloss on the novels that it almost evokes Wolfe's distant future all by itself. . . . It can provide both a useful reference and a good deal of fun." Donald Keller said, in the New York Review of Science Fiction: "A fruitful product of obsession, this is a thorough . . . dictionary of the Urth Cycle. . . . Andre-Driussi's research has been exhaustive, and he has discovered many fascinating things . . . [it is] head-spinning to confront a myriad of small and large details, some merely interesting, others jawdropping."

What is the role of sex in the age of democratic beginnings? Despite the sober republican ideals of the Enlightenment, the literature of America's early years speaks of unruly, carnal longings. Elizabeth Dill argues that the era's proliferation of texts about extramarital erotic intimacy manifests not an anxiety about the dangers of unfettered feeling, but an endorsement of it. Uncovering the more prurient aspects of nation-building, Erotic Citizens establishes the narrative of sexual ruin as a genre whose sustained rejection of marriage acted as a critique of that which traditionally defines a democracy: the social contract and the sovereign individual. Through an examination of philosophical tracts, political cartoons, frontispiece Illustrations, portraiture, and the novel from the antebellum period, this study reconsiders how the terms of embodiment and selfhood function to define national belonging. From an enslaved woman's story of survival in North Carolina to a philosophical treatise penned by an English earl, the readings employ the trope of sexual ruin to tell their tales. Such narratives advanced the political possibilities of the sympathetic body, looking beyond the marriage contract as the model for democratic citizenship. Against the cult of the individual that once seemed to define the era, Erotic Citizens argues that the most radical aspect of the Revolution was not the invention of a self-governing body, but the recognition of a self whose body is ungovernable.

The poetry of John Berryman (1914-1972) is primarily concerned with the self in response to the rapid social, political, sexual, racial, and technological transformations of the twentieth century, and their impact on the psyche and spirit, both individual and collective. He was just as likely to find inspiration in his local newspaper as he did from the poetry of Hopkins or Milton. In fact, in contrast to the popular perception of Berryman drunkenly composing strange, dreamlike, abstract, esoteric poems, Berryman was intensely aware of craft. His best work routinely utilizes a variety of rhetorical styles, shifting effortlessly from the lyric to the prosaic. For Berryman, poetry was nothing less than a vocation, a mission, and a way of life. Though he desired fame, he acknowledged its relative unimportance when he stated that the "important thing is that your work is something no one else can do". As a result, Berryman very rarely granted interviews - "I teach and I write", he explained, "I'm not copy" - yet when he did the results were always captivating. Collected in Conversations with John Berryman are all of Berryman's major interviews, personality pieces, profiles, and local interest items, where interviewers attempt to unravel him, as both Berryman and his interlocutors struggle to find value in poetry in a fallen world.

Children's literature continues to receive growing scholarly attention, and this is due, in part, to the increased awareness of the complexity of these works and their importance in the curriculum. While some books may become classics and continue to be read long after their publication, others are the product of contemporary society and reflect the changing values of modern American culture. So, too, those titles that have been singled out for recognition reveal the standards of awards committees. This reference is a guide to works of American children's fiction that have won awards between 1995 and 1999.

Some of the books were published before that period, and thus their recent recognition affirms their enduring value. Included are more than 750 alphabetically arranged entries for authors, titles, characters, and settings related to nearly 250 books. Entries for novels provide plot summaries and critical commentary, while those for authors give biographical information. The volume demonstrates the growing number of multicultural novels and books about nontraditional families, while it also shows the continuing importance of historical fiction and the waning appeal of traditional adventure novels. While the volume will be valuable to librarians and teachers and to scholars of children's literature, it will also be useful to anyone interested in these works as a commentary on American culture at the close of the twentieth century.

Shakespeare was fascinated by law, which permeated Elizabethan everyday life. The general impression one derives from the analysis of many plays by Shakespeare is that of a legal situation in transformation and of a dynamically changing relation between law and society, law and the jurisdiction of Renaissance times. Shakespeare provides the kind of literary supplement that can better illustrate the legal texts of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. There was a strong popular participation in the system of justice, and late sixteenth-century playwrights often made use of forensic models of narrative. Uncertainty about legal issues represented a rich potential for causing strong reactions in the public, especially feelings concerning the resistance to tyranny. The volume aims at highlighting some of the many legal perspectives and debates emplotted in Shakespearean plays, also taking into consideration the many texts that have been produced during the latest years on law and literature in the Renaissance.

How many layers of artifice can one artwork contain? How does forgery unsettle our notions of originality and creativity? Looking at both the literary and art worlds, Fake It investigates a set of fictional forgeries and hoaxes alongside their real-life inspirations and parallels. Mark Osteen shows how any forgery or hoax is only as good as its authenticating story-and demonstrates how forgeries foster fresh authorial identities while being deeply intertextual and frequently quite original. From fakes of the late eighteenth century, such as Thomas Chatterton's Rowley poems and the notorious "Shakespearean" documents fabricated by William-Henry Ireland, to hoaxes of the modern period, such as Clifford Irving's fake autobiography of Howard Hughes, the infamous Ern Malley forgeries, and the audacious authorial masquerades of Percival Everett, Osteen lays bare provocative truths about the conflicts between aesthetic and economic value. In doing so he illuminates the process of artistic creation, which emerges as collaborative and imitative rather than individual and inspired, revealing that authorship is, to some degree, always forged.

This volume celebrates the contribution of Professor Colin Williams, an immensely important and influential scholar in the field of language policy for more than forty years. Eighteen chapters by former students, colleagues and collaborators address a range of topics involving different aspects of language legislation and language rights, governance, economics, territoriality, land use planning, and onomastics. Six chapters address policy issues in Professor Williams's native Wales while others focus on Canada, Catalonia, Ireland and Scotland. The volume concludes with an Afterword by Professor Williams himself. The book will be suitable for postgraduates and researchers not only in the field of language policy and planning but also sociolinguistics, geography, law and political science.

Virtually unknown outside of her adopted hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, Jane Edna Harris Hunter was one of the most influential African American social activists of the early-to mid-twentieth century. In her autobiography A Nickel and a Prayer, Hunter presents an enlightening two-part narrative that recollects her formative years in post-Civil War South and her activist years in Cleveland. First published in 1940, Hunter's autobiography recalls a childhood filled with the pleasures and pains of family life on the former plantation where her ancestors had toiled, adventures and achievements in schools for African American children, tests and trials during her brief marriage, and recognition and respect while completing nursing training and law school. When sharing the story of her life as an activist, Hunter describes the immense obstacles she overcame while developing an interracial coalition to support the Phillis Wheatley Association and nurturing its growth from a rented home that provided accommodation for twenty-two women to a nine-story building that featured one hundred and thirty-five rooms. This new and annotated edition of A Nickel and a Prayer includes the final chapter, ""Fireside Musings,"" that Hunter added to the second, limited printing of her autobiography and an introduction that lauds her as a multifaceted social activist who not only engaged in racial uplift work, but impacted African American cultural production, increased higher education opportunities for women, and invigorated African American philanthropy. This important text restores Jane Edna Harris Hunter to her rightful place among prominent African American race leaders of the twentieth century.

Moral electricity-a term coined by American transcendentalists in the 1850s to describe the force of nature that was literacy and education in shaping a greater society. This concept wasn't strictly an American idea, of course, and Ronald Briggs introduces us to one of the greatest examples of this power: the literary scene in Lima, Peru, in the nineteenth century. As Briggs notes in the introduction to The Moral Electricity of Print, ""the ideological glue that holds the American hemisphere together is a hope for the New World as a grand educational project combined with an anxiety about the baleful influence of a politically and morally decadent Old World that dominated literary output through its powerful publishing interests."" The very nature of living as a writer and participating in the literary salons of Lima was, by definition, a revolutionary act that gave voice to the formerly colonized and now liberated people. In the actions of this literary community, as men and women worked toward the same educational goals, we see the birth of a truly independent Latin American literature.

Arriving in New York at the tail end of what has been termed the "Golden Age" of Broadway and the start of the Off Broadway theater movement, Terrence McNally (1938-2020) first established himself as a dramatist of the absurd and a biting social critic. He quickly recognized, however, that one is more likely to change people's minds by first changing their hearts, and-in outrageous farces like The Ritz and It's Only a Play-began using humor more broadly to challenge social biases. By the mid-1980s, as the emerging AIDS pandemic called into question America's treatment of persons isolated by suffering and sickness, he became the theater's great poet of compassion, dramatizing the urgent need of human connection and the consequences when such connections do not take place. Conversations with Terrence McNally collects nineteen interviews with the celebrated playwright. In these interviews, one hears McNally reflect on theater as the most collaborative of the arts, the economic pressures that drive the theater industry, the unique values of music and dance, and the changes in American theater over McNally's fifty-plus year career. The winner of four competitive Tony Awards as the author of the Best Play (Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class) and author of the book for the Best Musical (Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime), McNally holds the distinction of being one of the few writers for the American theater who excelled in straight drama as well as musical comedy. In addition, his canon extends to opera; his collaboration with composer Jake Heggie, Dead Man Walking, has proven the most successful new American opera of the last twenty-five years.

Translated into English for the first time, Andres Avelino de Orihuela's El Sol de Jesus del Monte is a landmark Cuban antislavery novel. Published originally in 1852, the same year as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (which Orihuela had translated into Spanish), it provides an uncompromising critique of discourses of white superiority and an endorsement of equality for free people of color. Despite its historical and literary value, The Sun of Jesus del Monte is a long-neglected text, languishing for 150 years until its republication in 2008 in the original Spanish. The Sun of Jesus del Monte is the only Cuban novel of its time to focus on La Escalera, or the Ladder Rebellion, a major anticolonial and slave insurrection of nineteenth-century Cuba that shook the world's wealthiest colony in 1843-44. It is also the only Cuban novel of its time to take direct aim at white privilege and unsparingly denounce the oppression of free people of color that intensified after the insurrection. This new critical edition-featuring an invaluable, contextualizing introduction and afterword in addition to the new English translation-offers readers the most detailed portrait of the everyday lives and plight of free people of color in Cuba in any novel up to the 1850s.

Contributions by Amylou Ahava, Jeff Ambrose, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Daniel P. Compora, Penny Crofts, Keith Currie, Erin Giannini, Diganta Roy, Hannah Lina Schneeberger, Shannon S. Shaw, Maria Wiegel, and Margaret J. Yankovich First published in 1986, Stephen King's novel IT forever changed the legacy of the literary clown. The subject of a TV miniseries and a two-part film adaptation and the inspiration for a resurgence of the evil clown figure in popular culture, IT's influence is undeniable, yet scholarship to date is almost exclusively devoted to the adaptations rather than the novel itself. Encountering Pennywise: Critical Perspectives on Stephen King's "IT" considers the pronounced cultural fluctuations of IT's legacies by centering the novel within the theoretical frameworks that animate it and ensure its literary and cultural persistence. The collection explores the ways the novel, so like its antagonist, replicates (or disavows) the icons of various canons and categories in order to accomplish specific psychological and cultural work. Gathering the work of scholars from diverse professional and disciplinary vantage points, editor Whitney S. May has curated an anthology that spans discussions of American surveillance culture, intergenerational conflict, the legacies of settler colonialism and Native American representation, serial-killer fanaticism, and more. In this volume, we read the protagonists' constellations of countermoves against Pennywise as productive outlines of critique effectuated by the richness of the clown's reflective power. The essays are therefore thematically arranged into a series of four categories of "counter"-countercurrents, countercultures, counterclaims, and counterfeits-where each supplies a specific critical lens through which to view Pennywise's disruptions of both culture and cultural critique.

These nineteen original essays seek to recontextualize the subject of immortality, examining its influence as an ancient human aspiration while at the same time considering new scientific advances and their impact on life and literature. Grouped in three broad categories, the essays provide key information about and concepts of immortality, examine science fiction stories and scientific research to consider the prospects and possible effects of achieving immortality, and discuss immortality and life extension as literary themes. The topics the essays focus on, as well as the perspectives of the contributors, range widely: genetics, cryonics, Marxism, Darwinism, cyberspace, feminist writing, religion, Italian science fiction, film, children's literature, video games, and comic books.

This literary, cultural history examines imperial Russian tourism's entanglement in the vexed issue of cosmopolitanism understood as receptiveness to the foreign and pitted against provinciality and nationalist anxiety about the allure and the influence of Western Europe. The study maps the shift from Enlightenment cosmopolitanism to Byronic cosmopolitanism with special attention to the art pilgrimage abroad. For typically middle-class Russians daunted by the cultural riches of the West, vacationing in the North Caucasus, Georgia, and the Crimea afforded the compensatory opportunity to play colonizer kings and queens in "Asia." Drawing on Anna Karenina and other literary classics, travel writing, journalism, and guidebooks, the investigation engages with current debates in cosmopolitan studies, including the fuzzy paradigm of "colonial cosmopolitanism.

Ever since Bessie Smith's powerful voice conspired with the ""race records" industry to make her a star in the 1920s, African American writers have memorialized the sounds and theorized the politics of black women's singing. In Black Resonance, Emily J. Lordi analyzes writings by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, and Nikki Giovanni that engage such iconic singers as Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, and Aretha Franklin. Focusing on two generations of artists from the 1920s to the 1970s, Black Resonance reveals a musical-literary tradition in which singers and writers, faced with similar challenges and harboring similar aims, developed comparable expressive techniques. Drawing together such seemingly disparate works as Bessie Smith's blues and Richard Wright's neglected film of Native Son, Mahalia Jackson's gospel music and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, each chapter pairs one writer with one singer to crystallize the artistic practice they share: lyricism, sincerity, understatement, haunting, and the creation of a signature voice. In the process, Lordi demonstrates that popular female singers are not passive muses with raw, natural, or ineffable talent. Rather, they are experimental artists who innovate black expressive possibilities right alongside their literary peers. The first study of black music and literature to centralize the music of black women, Black Resonance offers new ways of reading and hearing some of the twentieth century's most beloved and challenging voices.

From Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons and Anzia Yzierska's The Bread Givers to Laurie Colwin's Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object and Chet Raymo's The Dork of Cork, here are some of the forgotten gems of American literature. Bridges has compiled a diverse list of 100 American novels published between 1797 and 1997 and worthy of the title great. Although the idea is to bring light to the obscure, these titles are physically accessible to readers-either in print, or represented in library collections and available through library loan. For each title, he provides a brief quotation from the book, a plot summary and review commentary, a biographical sketch of the author, a list of the author's other publications, and resources to consult for further information. Intended as a ready reference, this guide will be of particular interest to readers' advisors, and faculty and students of American literature.

In this companion guide, Michael Andre-Driussi illuminates Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun and Book of the Short Sun science fiction series through dictionary-style entries on the characters, gods, locations, themes, and timelines of the novels. Gate of Horn, Book of Silk, is organized in two parts, with the first half covering the Long Sun series (Nightside the Long Sun, Lake of the Long Sun, Calde of the Long Sun, and Exodus from the Long Sun) and the second half covering the Short Sun series (On Blue's Waters, In Green's Jungles, and Return to the Whorl) half covering one of the two series. "Languages of the Whorl," a section between the two parts, covers all the dialect, slang, and foreign terms used in the books--thieves' cant, flier language, Tick's talk, and more. Ten maps and diagrams are included. This is Michael Andre-Driussi's third guidebook to the rich tapestries of Gene Wolfe's worlds. As fans of of Lexicon Urthus and The Wizard Knight Companion have noted, that each book is both a convenient tool for a question while re-reading the novels but also an enjoyable read in its own right, from A to Z.

This book, available for the first time in English, offers a thorough introductory reading of Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most remarkable and influential writers of the twentieth century. Julio Premat, a specialist in the field of Borges studies, presents the main questions posed by Borges's often paradoxical writing, and leads the novice through the complexity and breadth of Borges's vast literary production. Originally published in French by an Argentine ex-pat living in Paris, Borges includes the Argentine specificities to Borges's work-specificities that are often unrecognized or glossed over in Anglophone readings. This book is a boon for university students of philosophy and literature, teachers and researchers in these fields who are looking to better understand this complex author, and anyone interested in the advanced study of literature. Somewhere between a guidebook and an exhaustive work of advanced research, Borges is the ultimate stepping stone into the deeper Borgesian world.