Browse by Subject: American

Please note that while you may order forthcoming books at any time, they will not be available for shipment until shortly before publication date

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Zora Neale Hurston and American Literary Culture

Taking a close look at Zora Neale Hurston's historical and literary contexts, this book investigates why Hurston's writing fell out of favor during her lifetime only to be reclaimed and appreciated years after her death.

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B is for Baldwin: An Alphabet Tour of the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature

The Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature, part of Special and Area Studies in the Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida, is one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of children’s books in the world. This lushly illustrated volume offers a glimpse into rarities and wonders of the Baldwin.

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Black Well-Being: Health and Selfhood in Antebellum Black Literature

Analyzing slave narratives, emigration polemics, a murder trial, and black-authored fiction, Andrea Stone highlights the central role physical and mental health and well-being played in antebellum black literary constructions of selfhood. At a time when political and medical theorists emphasized black well-being in their arguments for or against slavery, African American men and women developed their own theories about what it means to be healthy and well in contexts of injury, illness, sexual abuse, disease, and disability.


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The Gulf South: An Anthology of Environmental Writing

Reaching from Texas to Florida and featuring a diverse array of voices from the past 100 years, this collection of environmental writing about the Gulf South region enriches how we understand the relationship between people and the rapidly changing ecology of the Gulf.

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Sacraments of Memory: Catholicism and Slavery in Contemporary African American Literature

Sacraments of Memory is the first book to focus on Catholic themes and imagery in African American literature. Erin Michael Salius discovers striking elements of the religion in neo-slave narratives written by Toni Morrison, Ernest Gaines, Leon Forrest, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Charles R. Johnson, and Edward P. Jones.

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Furiously Funny: Comic Rage from Ralph Ellison to Chris Rock

A combustible mix of fury and radicalism, pathos and pain, wit and love--Terrence Tucker calls it "comic rage," and he shows how it has been used by African American artists to aggressively critique America's racial divide.

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Eroticism, Spirituality, and Resistance in Black Women's Writings

Beginning with Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and continuing into contemporary black women's writings, Donna Weir-Soley emphasizes the importance of sexuality in the development of black female subjectivity. Analyzing the works and characters of such writers as Toni Morrison, Opal Palmer Adisa, and Edwidge Danticat, she reveals how these writers highlight the interplay between the spiritual and the sexual through religious symbols found in Voudoun, Santeria, Condomble, Kumina, and Hoodoo.

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In Search of Asylum: The Later Writings of Eric Walrond

Eric Walrond is one of the great underexamined figures of the Harlem Renaissance and the Caribbean diaspora. Compiling Walrond’s European journalism and later fiction, as well as the pieces he wrote during the 1950s at Roundway Hospital in Wiltshire, England, where he was a voluntary patient, this collection at last fills in the biographical gaps in Walrond’s life. It provides insights into the contours of his later work and the cultural climates in which he functioned between 1928 and his death in 1966.

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Hemingway and Italy: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives

From his World War I service in Italy through his transformational return visits during the decades that followed, Ernest Hemingway's Italian experiences were fundamental to his artistic development. Hemingway and Italy offers essays from top scholars, exciting new voices, and people who knew Hemingway during his Italian days, examining how his adopted homeland shaped his writing and his legacy.

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The Cubalogues: Beat Writers in Revolutionary Havana