A Nation of Immigrants?
Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy, Katherine Benton-Cohen. Harvard University Press, 2018.
View ArticleTranscendentalism Without Escape
Emerson’s Memory Loss: Originality, Communality, and the Late Style, Christopher Hanlon. Oxford University Press, 2018.
View ArticleCritique, Tweaked
Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures, Timothy Aubry. Harvard University Press, 2018.
View ArticleMultilingualism, Multiculturalism, and Migration: A Critical Assessment
Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas about Race, H. Samy Alim, John R. Rickford, and Arnetha F. Ball, editors. Oxford University Press, 2016.
View ArticlePoetry and the War(s)
American Poetry and the First World War, Tim Dayton. Cambridge University Press, 2018.
View ArticleThe Unspeakable Speculative, Spoken
Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction, Mark C. Jerng. Fordham University Press, 2018.
View ArticleOur Town, the MacDowell Colony, and the Art of Civic Mediation
In 2011, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the major federal funding body for culture in the US, launched a new set of “creative placemaking” grants. These grants support public–private...
View ArticleCormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, and the Responsibility to Protect
In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), the unnamed father, mortally sickened as he traverses a postapocalyptic and stateless wasteland with his young son, sees the boy from afar, “standing there in the...
View ArticleMigrants at the Center: Expulsion Regimes, Self-Representation, and...
Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration, Ana Raquel Minian. Harvard University Press, 2018.
View ArticleLyric Reading Revisited: Passion, Address, and Form in Citizen
The connotations of lyric reading have always been pejorative. Paul de Man coins the term in “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” an essay in which he presents one sonnet by Charles Baudelaire as...
View ArticleMoving Futures
African Exodus: Migration and the Future of Europe, Asfa-Wossen Asserate. Translated by Peter Lewis, Haus Publishing, 2018.
View ArticleThe Arts of War and Deception
Veteran Americans: Literature and Citizenship from Revolution to Reconstruction, Benjamin Cooper. University of Massachusetts Press, 2018.
View ArticleThe Economic Humanities and the History of Financial Advice
AbstractThis article charts the emerging interdisciplinary field of the Economic Humanities, and highlights a recent research project on the history of US financial advice writing as an example of what...
View ArticleImagining Equality in a Gilded Age: Edward Bellamy’s Radical Utopian Critique...
AbstractEquality (1897), Edward Bellamy’s sequel to his bestseller Looking Backward (1888), has received significantly less critical attention than its predecessor has, with scholars often dismissing...
View ArticleThe Cultural Economies of Digital Books
AbstractAn examination of the possible relations between literature and the digital. Each of three recent books, including Zara Dinnen’s The Digital Banal (2018), Andrew Piper’s Enumerations (2018),...
View ArticleSurvivalism and Other Class Fantasies
AbstractThe subjective demands of crisis capitalism are addressed by three books on the literature and culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These texts shed light on the...
View ArticlePudding Economics: Franklin’s “The Way to Wealth” and the Transactional Self
AbstractBenjamin Franklin’s preface to the 1758 edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack, usually titled “The Way to Wealth,” is generally regarded as a sermon on frugality. The very form of the 1758...
View ArticleRomanticism of Numbers: Hamilton, Jefferson, and the Sublime
AbstractThis essay analyzes the narrative elements of the partisan dispute concerning Hamilton’s fiscal proposals in the first years of the 1790s. Focusing especially on a sequence of letters from the...
View ArticleContemporary Poetry and Capitalism
AbstractThe field of poetry and poetics has been revitalized by a decade and a half of close attention to many of its enduring premises and assumptions. Three new books by Jasper Bernes, Margaret...
View Article
