"Righteous Violence" examines the struggles with the violence of slavery and revolution that engaged the imaginations of seven nineteenth-century American writers--Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville.

These authors responded not only to the state terror of slavery and the Civil War but also to more problematic violent acts, including unlawful revolts, insurrections, riots, and strikes that resulted in bloodshed and death. Rather than position these writers for or against the struggle for liberty, Larry J. Reynolds examines the profoundly contingent and morally complex perspectives of each author. Tracing the shifting and troubled moral arguments in their work, Reynolds shows that these writers, though committed to peace and civil order, at times succumbed to bloodlust, even while they expressed ambivalence about the very violence they approved. For many of these authors, the figure of John Brown loomed large as an influence and a challenge. Reynolds examines key works such as Fuller's European dispatches, Emerson's political lectures, Douglass's novella "The Heroic Slave," Thoreau's "Walden," Alcott's" Moods," Hawthorne's late unfinished romances, and Melville's" Billy Budd."

In addition to demonstrating the centrality of righteous violence to the American Renaissance, this study deepens and complicates our understanding of political violence beyond the dichotomies of revolution and murder, liberty and oppression, good and evil.

Political issues and events have always acted as a catalyst on thought and art. In this pioneering study, Larry J. Reynolds argues that the European revolutions of 1848-49 quickened the American literary imagination and shaped the characters, plots, and themes of the American renaissance. He traces the impact of the revolutions on Emerson, Fuller, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Thoreau, showing that the upheavals abroad both inspired and disturbed. Unlike many studies that have emphasized the national features and revolutionary spirit of our classic American literature, Reynolds's study, which places this literature in an international context, reveals its conservative, counterrevolutionary side. Emerson, the writer first considered, witnessed the revolutionary turmoil in England and France during the spring of 1848. Reynolds contends that Emerson disdained the revolutions but was unable to resist their challenge: they inspired him to articulate with renewed vigor the idealism at the center of his spiritual life. Reynolds describes next the "Bloody June Days" in Paris and examines their effect on American writings, particularly Uncle Tom's Cabin. In his discussion of Margaret Fuller, Reynolds compares her response to the socialist revolution with Emerson's and demonstrates that her Tribune dispatches from Italy, written during the Roman Revolution, constitute a powerful historical narrative of unrecognized artistry and value. Turning to the writings of Hawthorne and Melville, Reynolds explains that these authors, who viewed the revolutions skeptically, were moved to incorporate into their masterpieces the imagery and issues attracting public attention around them. Focusing on Whitman's fascination with the revolutionary events he covered as an editor, Reynolds describes how under their influence Whitman conceived himself as a poet of insurrection and began Leaves of Grass. He concludes with Thoreau, showing how residual excitement about the revolutions led to the reshaping of Walden into a spiritual autobiography emphasizing purity and serenity.

Nathanial Hawthorne is one of the most widely taught American authors. This historical guide collects a number of original essays by Hawthorne scholars that place the author in historical context. Like all of the Historical Guides to American Authors, this volume includes an introduction, a brief biography, a bibliographical essay, and an illustrated chronology of the author's life and times. Combining cultural criticism with historical scholarship, A Historical Guide to Nathanial Hawthorne addresses a wide range of topics relevant to Hawthorne's work, including slavery, children, mesmerism, and the visual arts.

This practical, hands-on guide provides site-based management teams with the essential steps to implementation that will enable teams to spend less time organizing and establishing policies, and more time focusing on the substantive issues of school change.

Examining the most frequently taught works by key writers of the American Renaissance, including Poe, Emerson, Fuller, Douglass, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Jacobs, Stowe, Whitman, and Dickinson, this engaging and accessible book offers the crucial historical, social, and political contexts in which they must be studied. Larry J. Reynolds usefully groups authors together for more lively and fruitful discussion and engages with current as well as historical theoretical debates on the area. The book includes essential biographical and historical information to situate and contextualize the literature, and incorporates major relevant criticism in each chapter. Recommended readings for further study, along with a list of works cited, conclude each chapter.

Examining the most frequently taught works by key writers of the American Renaissance, including Poe, Emerson, Fuller, Douglass, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Jacobs, Stowe, Whitman, and Dickinson, this engaging and accessible book offers the crucial historical, social, and political contexts in which they must be studied. Larry J. Reynolds usefully groups authors together for more lively and fruitful discussion and engages with current as well as historical theoretical debates on the area. The book includes essential biographical and historical information to situate and contextualize the literature, and incorporates major relevant criticism in each chapter. Recommended readings for further study, along with a list of works cited, conclude each chapter.

From the American Revolution to the present, the United States has enjoyed a rich and persuasive visual culture. These images have constructed, sustained, and disseminated social values and identities, but this unwieldy, sometimes untidy form of cultural expression has received less systematic attention than other modes of depicting American life. Recently, scholars in the humanities have developed a new critical approach to reading images and the cultural work they perform. This practice, American cultural iconography, is generating sophisticated analyses of how images organize our public life. The contributions to this volume exhibit the extraordinary scope and interpretive power of this interdisciplinary study while illuminating the dark corners of the nation's psyche.

Drawing on such varied texts and visual media as daguerreotypes, political cartoons, tourist posters, and religious artifacts, these essays explore how pictures and words combine to teach us who we are and who we are not. They examine mimesis in elegant portraits of black Freemasons, industrial-age representations of national parks, and postwar photographs of atomic destruction. They consider how visual culture has described and disclosed the politics of racialized sexuality, whether subconsciously affirming it in the shadows of film noir or deliberately contesting it through the interethnic incest of John Sayles's "Lone Star." Students of literature, film, and history will find that these essays extend the frontier of American studies.

The contributors are Maurice Wallace, Dennis Berthold, Alan Trachtenberg, Shirley Samuels, Jenny Franchot, Cecelia Tichi, Eric Lott, Bryan C. Taylor, and Jose E. Limon."

This volume, growing out of the celebrated turn toward history in literary criticism, showcases some of the best new historical work being done today in textual theory, literary history, and cultural criticism. The collection brings together for the first time key representativesfrom various schools of historicist scholarship, including leading critics whose work has helped define new historicism. The essays illuminate literary periods ranging from Anglo-Saxon to postmodern, a variety of literary texts that includes "The Siege of Thebes," "Macbeth," "The Jazz Singer," and "The Chosen Place, the Timeless People," and central issues that have marked new historicism: power, ideology, textuality, othering, marginality, exile, and liberation.

The contributors are Janet Aikins, Lawrence Buell, Ralph Cohen, Margaret Ezell, Stephen Greenblatt, Terence Hoagwood, Jerome McGann, Robert Newman, Katherine O'Keeffe, Lee Patterson, Michael Rogin, Edward Said, and Hortense Spillers. The editors' introduction situates the various essays within contemporary criticism and explores the multiple, contestatory issues at stake within the historicist enterprise.

"Righteous Violence" examines the struggles with the violence of slavery and revolution that engaged the imaginations of seven nineteenth-century American writers--Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville.

These authors responded not only to the state terror of slavery and the Civil War but also to more problematic violent acts, including unlawful revolts, insurrections, riots, and strikes that resulted in bloodshed and death. Rather than position these writers for or against the struggle for liberty, Larry J. Reynolds examines the profoundly contingent and morally complex perspectives of each author. Tracing the shifting and troubled moral arguments in their work, Reynolds shows that these writers, though committed to peace and civil order, at times succumbed to bloodlust, even while they expressed ambivalence about the very violence they approved. For many of these authors, the figure of John Brown loomed large as an influence and a challenge. Reynolds examines key works such as Fuller's European dispatches, Emerson's political lectures, Douglass's novella "The Heroic Slave," Thoreau's "Walden," Alcott's" Moods," Hawthorne's late unfinished romances, and Melville's" Billy Budd."

In addition to demonstrating the centrality of righteous violence to the American Renaissance, this study deepens and complicates our understanding of political violence beyond the dichotomies of revolution and murder, liberty and oppression, good and evil.

Margaret Fuller-journalist, critic, radical feminist, and political activist-was a foreign correspondent for the New-York Tribune from 1846-50. This engrossing book provides the first complete edition of Fuller's dispatches from England, France, and Italy, which began as engaging travel sketches but soon turned into moving and dramatic eyewitness accounts of the most widespread revolutionary upheaval within modern history. Fuller's letters are extraordinarily good. They will be of interest to scholars of American literature and history, women's studies, and European literature and history.-Joel Myerson, University of South Carolina This collection of thirty-seven dispatches written for Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune presents an opportunity to view Fuller] as a developing personality, burning off heaps of silliness and taking on something like character-even splendor-as she finds herself caught up in the brief, calamitous life of the Roman Republic during the European uprisings of the late 1840s.-Thomas Mallon, New Criterion Recommended for the power of Fuller's own writing, for its capacity to convey the emotional idealism of liberal America as well as liberal Italy, not to mention the amusement she as well as her readers derive from observing the sight-seer 'abroad.'-Agatha Ramm, International History Review This welcome edition has made more accessible the works of an important figure in American literary history.-Sylvia Neely, Journal of the Early Republic

Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of the most likely taught American authors. This historical guide collects a number of original essays by Hawthorne scholars that place the author in historical context. Like all of the Historical Guides to American Authors, this volume includes an introduction, a brief biography, a bibliographical essay, and an illustrated chronology of the author's life and times. Combining cultural criticism with historical scholarship, A Historical Guide to Nathanial Hawthorn addresses a wide range of topics relevant to Hawthorne's work, including slavery, children, mesmerism, and the visual arts.

This practical, hands-on guide provides site-based management teams with the essential steps to implementation that will enable teams to spend less time organizing and establishing policies, and more time focusing on the substantive issues of school change.