The Philosophy of Generosity in Shakespeare and Marlowe
Original readings of Dr. Faustus, The Merchant of Venice, Edward II, King Lear, Titus Andronicus, and The Tempest, in which Sean Lawrence challenges the tendency to reflexively understand gifts as exchanges or negotiations. Lawrence uses the philosophies of Levinas and Derrida to argue that these plays depict a radical generosity that breaks the ......
My Encounter with Racism and the Forbidden Word in an American Classic
A Black man's experience of reading Mark Twain's classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for the first time, this book captures the author's struggle with Twain's use of the racial epithet more than two hundred times in the text. Harris inspires readers to redress the long history of American racism and white supremacy bound up with the N word.
Explores Black representation in fantasy genres and comic books Characters like Black Panther, Storm, Luke Cage, Miles Morales, and Black Lightning are part of a growing cohort of black superheroes on TV and in film. Though comic books are often derided as naive and childish, these larger-than-life superheroes demonstrate how this genre can ......
A masterful combination of literary study and author biography, How Sherlock Pulled the Trick guides us through the parallel careers of two inseparable men: Sherlock Holmes and his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
"Hold tight. The way to go mad without losing your mind is sometimes unruly." So begins La Marr Jurelle Bruce's urgent provocation and poignant meditation on madness in black radical art. Bruce theorizes four overlapping meanings of madness: the lived experience of an unruly mind, the psychiatric category of serious mental illness, the emotional ......
Illustrates how the discovery of electromagnetism in 1820 not only led to technological inventions, such as the dynamo and the telegraph, but also legitimized modes of reasoning that manifested a sharper ability to perceive how metonymic relations could reveal the order of things.
The National Endowment for the Humanities has funded two Summer Institutes titled "Reconsidering Flannery O'Connor", which invited scholars to rethink approaches to Flannery O'Connor's work. Drawing largely on research that started as part of the 2014 NEH Institute, this collection shares its title and its mission. Featuring fourteen new essays, ......
Appropriating Milton in Early African American Literature
Pursuing things yet unattempted in literary criticism, Reginald A. Wilburn offers the first scholarly work to theorize African American authors’ rebellious appropriations of Milton and his canon. This comparative and hybrid study engages African Americans’ transatlantic negotiations with perhaps the preeminent freedom writer in the ......
