Language and Literature: English: African Culture & Melville's Art, Carribbean Female Bodies & Literature, and a Study on the Perception of Slavery

African Culture and Melville's Art: The Creative Process in Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick (BOOK): by Sterling Stuckey

Although Herman Melville's masterworks Moby-Dick and Benito Cereno have long been the subject of vigorous scholarly examination, the impact of African culture on these works has received surprisingly little critical attention. Presenting a groundbreaking reappraisal of these two powerful pieces of fiction, Sterling Stuckey reveals how African customs and rituals heavily influenced one of America's greatest novelists.

Allegories of Desire: Body, Nation, and Empire in Modern Caribbean Literature by Women (BOOK): by M.M. Adjarian

This book explores the relationship between famous and fictional Caribbean female bodies to literary and historical writing.

Calls and Responses: The American Novel of Slavery Since Gone With the Wind (BOOK): by Tim A. Ryan

In this comprehensive, groundbreaking study, Tim A. Ryan explores how American novelists since World War I have imagined the institution of slavery and the experience of those involved in it. Complicating the common assumption that authentic black-authored fiction about slavery is starkly opposed to the traditional, racist fiction (and history) created by whites, Ryan suggests that discourses about American slavery are--and have always been--defined by connections rather than disjunctions. Ryan contends that African American writers didn't merely reject and move beyond traditional portrayals of the black past but rather actively engaged in a dynamic dialogue with white-authored versions of slavery and existing historiographical debates. The result is an ongoing cultural conversation that transcends both racial and disciplinary boundaries and is akin to the call-and-response style of African American gospel music.

Critical Theory: The Major Documents (BOOK): by Edgar Allen Poe edited with introduction, notes, and textual variants by Stuart Levine and Susan F. Levine

“A solid resource for scholars of Poe. Highly recommended”—Choice

"Poe's quotations and misquotations are assiduously identified and corrected. Obscure references are made clear, and connections among a variety of Poe's writings are drawn. Poe's playfulness, even in criticism, repeatedly comes through, as does his occasional tendency to lapse into unfairness merely to make a point or to put the punch line on a joke. There is still a need, over one hundred years after Poe's death, for traditional scholarship of this kind. . . . This new volume is clearly the most authoritative edition of the works presented, and it is likely to remain so for sometime."—Poe Studies