Crusade scholarship has exploded in popularity over the past two decades. This volume captures the resulting diversity of approaches, which often cross cultures and academic disciplines. The contributors to this volume offer new perspectives on topics as varied as the application of Roman law on slavery to the situation of Muslims in the Latin East, Muslim appropriation of Latin architectural spolia, the roles played by the crusade in medieval preaching, and the impact of Latin East refugees on religious geography in late medieval Cyprus. Together these essays demonstrate how pervasive the institution of crusade was in medieval Christendom, as much at home in Europe as in the Latin East, and how much impact it carried forth into the modern era. Contributors are Richard Allington, Jessalynn Bird, Adam M. Bishop, Tomasz Borowski, Yan Bourke, Sam Zeno Conedera, Charles W. Connell, Cathleen A. Fleck, Lisa Mahoney, and C. Matthew Phillips.

With more than thirty-five million copies in print, the Little House series, written in the 1930s and 1940s by Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, has been a spectacular commercial success. What is it about this eight-volume serial novel for children that accounts for its enduring power? And what does the popularity of these books tell us about the currents of American culture? Ann Romines interweaves personal observation with scholarly analysis to address these questions. Writing from a feminist perspective and drawing on resources of gender studies, cultural studies, and new historicist reading, she examines both the content of the novels and the process of their creation. She explores the relationship between mother and daughter working as collaborative authors and calls into question our assumptions about plot, juvenile fiction, and constructions of gender on the nineteenth-century frontier and in the Depression years when the Little House books were written. This is a book that will appeal both to scholars and to general readers who might welcome an engaging and accessible companion volume to the Little House novels.

Willa Cather spent her first nine years in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, where her family had lived for five generations. Even after the Cathers' move to Nebraska, she came of age in an emphatically southern extended family, surrounded by Virginia stories, customs, and controversies. As Eudora Welty has declared, "She did not come out of Virginia for nothing." Throughout her career, Cather's fiction drew strength from the people, places, and issues of the Reconstruction South of her birth, culminating in her final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl.

This collection of essays is the first to look at this important southern connection in Cather's writing life. Ann Romines has brought together eminent Cather critics and fresh new voices. Judith Fetterley and Lisa Marcus restore Cather's southern origins to a central place in her career. Robert K. Miller reads My Mortal Enemy as a Reconstruction narrative, and Patricia Yaeger theorizes the racial language of Cather's landscapes. Among several essays on Sapphira, Mako Yoshikawa's and Tomas Pollard's contributions explore the novel's racial and sexual dynamics and abolitionist concerns. Cynthia Griffin Wolff views Cather's youthful experiments with clothes and gender as responses to contemporary theater and her mother's southern feminine style. Other critics compare Cather to other Southern writers: Allen Tate, Ellen Glasgow, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison.

Grounded both in traditional literary criticisms and in cultural studies, these sixteen essays make a compelling claim for the importance of Cather's southern connections.

Contributors:

Roseanne V. Camacho, University of LouisvilleJudith Fetterley, University at Albany, State University of New YorkLisa Marcus, Pacific Lutheran UniversityMarilyn Mobley McKenzie, George Mason UniversityRobert K. Miller, University of St. ThomasElsa Nettels, College of William and MaryShelley Newman, University of British ColumbiaTomas Pollard, Texas A&M UniversityAnn Romines, The George Washington UniversityMary R. Ryder, South Dakota State UniversityMerrill Maguire Skaggs, Drew UniversityJanis P. Stout, Texas A&M UniversityJoseph R. Urgo, Bryant CollegeGayle Wald, The George Washington UniversityCynthia Griffin Wolff, Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyPatricia Yaeger, University of MichiganMako Yoshikawa, Harvard University

Laura Ingalls Wilder and the American Frontier provides the reader with a broad sweep of information on Wilder not readily available in any other format. Included in this work are: discussions of Wilder's life; her writings and their influence on the interpretation of the American frontier, the feminine role in frontier life, Native American relations; and the use of the Little House as a teaching tool. Students of Western history, feminist scholars, home schoolteachers, and the Laura Ingalls Wilder following will find this an informative and enjoyable source.

Willa Cather spent her first nine years in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, where her family had lived for five generations. Even after the Cathers' move to Nebraska, she came of age in an emphatically southern extended family, surrounded by Virginia stories, customs, and controversies. As Eudora Welty has declared, "She did not come out of Virginia for nothing." Throughout her career, Cather's fiction drew strength from the people, places, and issues of the Reconstruction South of her birth, culminating in her final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl.

This collection of essays is the first to look at this important southern connection in Cather's writing life. Ann Romines has brought together eminent Cather critics and fresh new voices. Judith Fetterley and Lisa Marcus restore Cather's southern origins to a central place in her career. Robert K. Miller reads My Mortal Enemy as a Reconstruction narrative, and Patricia Yaeger theorizes the racial language of Cather's landscapes. Among several essays on Sapphira, Mako Yoshikawa's and Tomas Pollard's contributions explore the novel's racial and sexual dynamics and abolitionist concerns. Cynthia Griffin Wolff views Cather's youthful experiments with clothes and gender as responses to contemporary theater and her mother's southern feminine style. Other critics compare Cather to other Southern writers: Allen Tate, Ellen Glasgow, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison.

Grounded both in traditional literary criticisms and in cultural studies, these sixteen essays make a compelling claim for the importance of Cather's southern connections.

Contributors:

Roseanne V. Camacho, University of LouisvilleJudith Fetterley, University at Albany, State University of New YorkLisa Marcus, Pacific Lutheran UniversityMarilyn Mobley McKenzie, George Mason UniversityRobert K. Miller, University of St. ThomasElsa Nettels, College of William and MaryShelley Newman, University of British ColumbiaTomas Pollard, Texas A&M UniversityAnn Romines, The George Washington UniversityMary R. Ryder, South Dakota State UniversityMerrill Maguire Skaggs, Drew UniversityJanis P. Stout, Texas A&M UniversityJoseph R. Urgo, Bryant CollegeGayle Wald, The George Washington UniversityCynthia Griffin Wolff, Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyPatricia Yaeger, University of MichiganMako Yoshikawa, Harvard University