By Olaf Hansen (NHC Fellow, 1983–84) Addressing vital issues in the current revision of American literary studies, Olaf Hansen carries out an exposition of American writing as a philosophical tradition. His broad and comparative view of American culture reveals the importance of the American allegory as a genuine artistic and intellectual style and as a … Continued
Edited by Mary Ellis Gibson (NHC Fellow, 2007–08) Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913: A Critical Anthology makes accessible for the first time the entire range of poems written in English on the subcontinent from their beginnings in 1780 to the watershed moment in 1913 when Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature.Mary Ellis Gibson … Continued
By Houston A. Baker, Jr. (NHC Fellow, 1982–83) Relating the blues to American social and literary history and to Afro-American expressive culture, Houston A. Baker, Jr., offers the basis for a broader study of American culture at its "vernacular" level. He shows how the "blues voice" and its economic undertones are both central to the … Continued
By Mark Turner (NHC Fellow, 1989–90) and Francis-Noël Thomas For more than a decade, Clear and Simple as the Truth has guided readers to consider style not as an elegant accessory of effective prose but as its very heart. Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner present writing as an intellectual activity, not a passive application of verbal skills. … Continued
By Helmut Müller-Sievers (NHC Fellow, 1994–95) The most extensive surviving text by Georg Büchner is the "Treatise on the Barbel's Nervous System" from 1836. Helmut Müller-Sievers places it at the center of his investigations into the connection between anatomy and poetry. We begin with reflections on the problem of orientation in the 18th and early 19th … Continued
By Herbert F. Tucker (NHC Fellow, 2000–01) This book is the first to provide a connected history of epic poetry in Britain between the French Revolution and the First World War. Although epic is widely held to have been shouldered aside by the novel, if not invalidated in advance by modernity, in fact the genre … Continued
By Elizabeth McHenry (NHC Fellow, 1998–99) Over the past decade the popularity of black writers including E. Lynn Harris and Terry McMillan has been hailed as an indication that an active African American reading public has come into being. Yet this is not a new trend; there is a vibrant history of African American literacy, … Continued
Edited and translated by Marlene L. Daut (NHC Fellow, 2016–17), Grégory Pierrot, and Marion C. Rohrleitner The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) was the first antislavery and anticolonial uprising led by New World Africans to result in the creation of an independent and slavery-free nation state. The momentousness of this thirteen-year-long war generated thousands of pages of … Continued
By Kevin Ohi (NHC Fellow, 2004–05) Taking as its focus the erotic child in decadent aesthetics, this book explores the sexual and political stakes of an aestheticistexperience of rapture. Ohi examines the power of the work of art to transport, to disorient, to move, to extort the equivocal pleasuresof self-loss. He also explores how the … Continued
Edited by Claude Reichler (NHC Fellow, 1997–98) and Roland Ruffieux