This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of Michigan State University. Learn more at the TOME website, available... and This book begins by tracing the history of naturalist fiction from the 1860s into the twentieth century and the reasons it spread around the world. Hill explores the development of three naturalist figures—the degenerate body, the self-liberated woman, and the social milieu—through close readings of fiction from France, Japan, and...
This dissertation documents the centrality of emotion to Americans’ understanding of, participation in, and critiques of the expanding economy in the first half of the nineteenth century. By then, many people viscerally understood that white men’s attempts to procure credit and escape debt could produce fear, anger, guilt, and sadness....
In the United States there is little material culture that foster youth share in common while in state custody. Removed from alleged circumstances of abuse or neglect, these young people frequently relocate between residential care settings like group homes, institutional treatment centers, or single family foster homes. Due to perpetual...
Cultivating Citizens: Ecology and Nationality in U.S. Immigrant Literature explores how and why American ecosystems became objects of appreciation, intervention, and attachment within immigration literature published during the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century. Fictional and nonfictional stories about US-bound immigrants represented naturalization and nationality as materializing through interactions within human/nonhuman assemblageswhat we...
In a 1980 campaign speech to veterans, Ronald Reagan declared that the United States suffered from a "Vietnam syndrome." The war in Vietnam, Reagan said, had harmed American political life and made the public wary of the aggressive foreign policies Reagan believed were necessary to win the Cold War. I...
This dissertation examines the participation of tens of thousands of African-American servicemen in the occupation of Japan and the Korean war. It poses three questions: how were black servicemen incorporated into a postwar military empire; how did they help shape their nation's expanding Asian protectorate; and how did they understand...
This study of the novels of Nathanael West begins with the important threads of Wests life and their relationship to his works. James F. Light gives a detailed analysis of each of Wests novels, investigating in particular the works treatment of social criticism and manipulation of dream and symbol.
Lionel Trilling was one of the twentieth centurys most widely read and influential American literary critics. Mark Krupnick traces Trillings career from the 1920s through the 1970s, following the shifting intellectual and ideological currents in his thought. Krupnick places Trillings criticism and fiction in the context of his New York...
What can the theatrical use of food accomplish in performances which assert cultural, legal, or moral rights to food production and consumption in a food insecure society? Case studies comprising the USDA's 1933-34 World's Fair exhibits, the May 1933 Wisconsin Cooperative Milk Pool protest, the 1936 Federal Theatre Project living...