...Danielle Christmas Barbaric Culture and Black Critique: Black Antislavery Writers, Religion, and the Slaveholding Atlantic . By Stefan M. Wheelock . Charlottesville : Univ. of Virginia Press . 2016 . xiii, 216 pp. Cloth , $69.50 ; paper, $29.50 ; e-book, $29.50 . Black Well-Being...

... by its scholarly breadth, extensive use of manuscript sources, and insight- ful interpretations of natural history illustrations and collections as well as written texts. The Poetics of Natural History gracefully combines study of auto...

... be, producing scenes that refuse to be marshalled into the discrete chronology of simple plot and a host of characters whose lives overlap and blur in their shared circumstances and joint wounds. Copyright © 2016 by Duke University Press 2016 reparations sentimentalism serialization William Wells...

...Gordon Fraser The Moral Economies of American Authorship: Reputation, Scandal, and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Marketplace . By Ryan Susan M. . New York : Oxford Univ. Press . 2016 . x, 217 pp. Cloth , $69.00 ; e-book available. Plagiarama! William Wells Brown and the Aesthetic of...

...Hannah Wells Abstract In The Common Law (1881), Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote famously, “the life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.” This essay turns to this seminal work of American legal pragmatism to reconsider the stakes of pragmatism for contemporary studies of race...

... geoformally oriented underpinnings of US sovereignty. Finally, the essay suggests that cultivating a new geographical formalism—in complement to literary studies that rely on cultural geography—lends pivotal modes of legibility to literary texts as well as to reading practices. These modes of legibility have...

... as words “we” said rather than words put in the mouths of others. Subtle changes in Moore’s well-known poem “Silence” show her questioning the kind of artistic superiority displayed in the act of quotation, while her letters to various correspondents allow us to connect her changing notion of...

...Mark Rifkin In the spring of 1832, a well-respected Sauk warrior named Black Hawk led a group of Sauks, Foxes, Kickapoos, and Potawatomies across the Mississippi River, through lands formerly occupied by the Sauks. Characterized as an assault on white settlements by U.S. officials during and...

...Katherine D. Johnston Abstract This essay analyzes increasingly ubiquitous data collection and posits that metafiction is especially well suited to grapple with the significance of metadata and data surveillance, given its own preoccupation with watching itself watch. Making a critical intervention...

... necessarily drinkers (the writer’s fondness for drink is well known), but rather those reformers and idealists who, in their zeal for perfection, seek to obliterate the past. In his richest portrait of this temporal intemperance, “The Birth-Mark” (1843), Hawthorne portrays the perilous nature and effects of...

... subject of anti-English violence half a world away in order to lay claim to a global English identity. The essay compares the visual representation of that East Indian violence with a well-known image of violence in New England, John Underhill’s figure of the Mystic Fort massacre of the Pequot War...

..., and embodiedness to the gothic gloom of war and surveillance, finding its end in a subgenre of regressive telegraphic romances. Discussing short journal pieces from periodicals such as the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s as well as more canonical texts (from Walt Whitman to Emily Dickinson), “Tapping...

... modern. The unexpected pairing reveals the visual racial logics built into skyscraper aesthetics and adds an architectural thread to the well-established scholarship on Larsen’s novel. Copyright © 2017 by Duke University Press 2017 skyscraper modern architecture formalism passing Nella Larsen Louis...

... well as those that inform and motivate our work in the first place—in relative and relational terms. Apathy is more than a generational disposition of postmoderns or the cool, emotionless province of “critique” that Rita Felski identifies with what she (after the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur) names...

... the declining relevance of authorial character to the question of literary valuation rather earlier in the century than scholars have typically claimed. Further, the Stowe-Byron scandal prefigures the unevenness and contestation that would accompany that development as well as the degree to which it...

... reading practices, Jerng turns the attention of critical race theory and SF studies toward the problem of how we notice and evaluate race within the social field. Drawing on frameworks from philosophies of imagination and perception, as well as theories of virtuality, the essay highlights the cognitive...

... 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...

... clung to insensibility, as well as the social marginalization this charge portended for idiots, hysterics, and the sensorially disabled—a promising gesture that, in Edgar Huntly , finally runs aground in race. © 2013 by Duke University Press 2013 References Acerbi Joseph [Giuseppe] . 1802...

... isolation from the urban panics—both domestic and international—of the early Cold War, allowing us to rethink Faulkner’s strategies for imagining political community in this time. Through images of ruined and renewed urban forms, as well as the sounds that accompany material urban change, Requiem registers...