How American poets have explored driving, in all its facets 'Whither goest thou, America,' asked Jack Kerouac in On the Road, 'in thy shiny car in the night?' For American poets, the act of driving has always harbored a critical dichotomy. It can express the thrill and the freedom of the open road, but it can also foster fears of ecological ......
Literature and the Agricultural Trap from Shakespeare to Coetzee
A critical examination of the 'agricultural trap' in literature For thousands of years, agriculture and civilization were essentially synonymous. The superiority of farming over the unsettled, itinerant life of hunting and gathering appeared, to many, self-evident. Only recently has the field of anthropology challenged this assumption by ......
Literature and the Agricultural Trap from Shakespeare to Coetzee
A critical examination of the 'agricultural trap' in literature For thousands of years, agriculture and civilization were essentially synonymous. The superiority of farming over the unsettled, itinerant life of hunting and gathering appeared, to many, self-evident. Only recently has the field of anthropology challenged this assumption by ......
Navigating Native Land and Water in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake
It is one thing to draw a line in the sand but another to enforce it. In this innovative new work, Jessica Lauren Taylor follows the Native peoples and the newcomers who built and crossed emerging boundaries surrounding Indigenous towns and developing English plantations in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake Bay. In a riverine landscape defined ......
Navigating Native Land and Water in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake
It is one thing to draw a line in the sand but another to enforce it. In this innovative new work, Jessica Lauren Taylor follows the Native peoples and the newcomers who built and crossed emerging boundaries surrounding Indigenous towns and developing English plantations in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake Bay. In a riverine landscape defined ......
Undeniably iconoclastic, and doggedly practical where others were abstract, the late Richard Rorty was described by some as a philosopher with no philosophy. Rorty was skeptical of systems claiming to have answers, seeing scientific and aesthetic schools as vocabularies rather than as indispensable paths to truth. But his work displays a profound ......
Civic Identity and Orientalism in Britain's Global Eighteenth Century
What does it mean for a nation and its citizens to be virtuous? The term "virtue" is ubiquitous in eighteenth-century British literature, but its definition is more often assumed than explained. Bringing together two significant threads of eighteenth-century scholarship-one on republican civic identity and the mythic legacy of the freeborn Briton ......
Civic Identity and Orientalism in Britain's Global Eighteenth Century
What does it mean for a nation and its citizens to be virtuous? The term "virtue" is ubiquitous in eighteenth-century British literature, but its definition is more often assumed than explained. Bringing together two significant threads of eighteenth-century scholarship-one on republican civic identity and the mythic legacy of the freeborn Briton ......
The language of the Bible can be beautiful but profoundly elusive, possessing a strangeness that only deepens the committed reader's sense of its impenetrability. Based on the 2022 Richard E. Myers lectures given by renowned literary scholar Michael Edwards-the first Englishman ever elected to the Academie francaise-this book offers a close ......