.... One of the wonderful things about good essay collections is the way in which their introductions richly overview the collection’s field of study. Robert Blair St. George’s opening essay in Possible Pasts stands as vivid testimony to just how rewarding introductory material can be. Touching upon the...

...-century collaboration between the geologist and Spiritualist lecturer and writer William Denton and his wife, the psychometric medium Elizabeth Foote Denton, which produced a three-volume study titled The Soul of Things : Psychometric Researches and Discovery , published between 1863 and 1874...

... Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 . Durham, NC : Duke Univ. Press . Brown Bill . 2001 . “ Thing Theory .” Critical Inquiry 28 , no. 1 : 1 – 21 . Castronovo Russ . 2000 . “ The Antislavery Unconscious: Mesmer, Vodu, and ‘Equality.’ ” Mississippi Quarterly 53 , no. 1 : 41 – 56...

...Susan Fraiman Ed. Bill Brown. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. 2004. 471 pp. Cloth,$49.50; paper, $25.00. By Suzanne Juhasz. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press. 2003. x, 247 pp. Cloth, $60.00; paper, $24.00. 2005 206 American Literature Things. Ed. Bill Brown. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago...

...Jane F. Thrailkill © 2009 by Duke University Press 2009 Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture . By Lisa Woolfork. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. 2009. xi, 233 pp. $40.00. Worldly Acts and Sentient Things: The Persistence of Agency from Stein to DeLillo . By Robert Chodat. Ithaca...

...Deanna P. Koretsky Poetics of Character: Transatlantic Encounters, 1700–1900 . By Manning Susan . Cambridge, UK : Cambridge Univ. Press . 2013 . xiii , 315 pp. Cloth , $99.00 ; paper , $34.99 ; e-book , $79.00 . Common Things: Romance and the Aesthetics of Belonging in Atlantic...

...Jean M. Lutes Abstract The newspaper advice column has shaped the American imagination in unacknowledged ways. Using Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) as a lens into a wily, underestimated genre, I juxtapose West’s riff on the newspaper advice column with readings of the real thing. I...

... Aristotelian conception of the artifact. Through the lines in the dirt they feature, the works discussed in this essay bracket off the axes of the subject, the human, and the machine. To that end, they generate “failed artifacts” by isolating the exposures of human-made things to their environments as...

... of conflict itself—that is, conflict as an aesthetic device within narrative as well as the thing being narrated, the manifestation of force between actors aboard the slave ship. Because the enforcement of US law and security by 1850 tended toward something supra-territorial if not transnational in...

..., biblical precepts, and history. Howard follows the development of ideas about literariness in the antebellum evangelical context by first tracing their roots in a Puritan tradition of representing divine things in language and a Scottish aesthetic tradition that deemed such representations useful. Both of...

... real thing.” But the sculpture—described as “rough” and “ungainly”—in its atypical expression of the feminine simultaneously disables any easy aesthetic distance that would result in the attribution of beauty normatively defined. Instead, its particular non-normative form of femininity formalizes an...

... humanity’s attention to the surreptitiously active nature of things. © 2015 by Duke University Press 2015 naturalism new materialism Theodore Dreiser object-oriented ontology References Alaimo Stacy . 2010 . Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington : Indiana...

...Andrew Donnelly Abstract This article contrasts the reading pedagogy inspired by the “talking book” and the reading pedagogy described by Frederick Douglass. The talking book offers literacy as a thing to be acquired that can be traded for freedom. “Literacy as a gift” inculcates in students a view...

... Mind Is an Enchanting Thing” as a companion poem to “In Distrust of Merits,” which deals with another side of the question of what can keep humanity human. © 2008 by Duke University Press 2008 Cristanne Distrusting: Marianne Moore on Miller Feeling and War in the 1940s...

... power of disorder” that makes them more similar to the poststructuralism they imagine themselves most strenuously to oppose than they are to the thinkers discussed here. For Adams in particular, the advent of modernity entailed a revelation of chaos at the heart of things that could never be folded back...

... culturally dependent upon Great Britain. In addition, sati itself becomes a dynamic theatrical sign of a variety of local and international concerns connected to Asian Indians, Native Americans, and the place of the United States in global politics and culture. It reflects, among other things, both American...

... overwhelming desire to amputate one of more of their perfectly healthy limbs. Among the things that make the condition particularly mysterious is the challenge it offers to our standard conception of what constitutes a “whole” body. Two of O'Connor's most celebrated stories, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own...

... harbingers of a new understanding of life’s constant metamorphosis, implying that the seemingly fixed identity of things is one of modernity’s sleight-of-hand tricks that dissipates our ability to acknowledge, in her quotation of Jane Bennett, “the presence of an indeterminate vitality” in all things (124...

...Jessica Hurley Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 . By Halpern Orit . Durham, NC : Duke Univ. Press . 2014 . ix, 342 pp. Cloth , $99.95 ; paper, $27.95 . The Way Things Go: An Essay on the Matter of Second Modernism . By Jaffe Aaron . Minneapolis : Univ. of...