The classic study of literature from the Civil War, featuring critical profiles of notable figures who captured its grim reality and profound meaning. In his introduction to Patriotic Gore, Edmund Wilson asks, "Has there ever been another historical crisis of the magnitude of 1861–1865 in which so many people were so articulate?" Regarded by many as Wilson's greatest book, Patriotic Gore more than proves the point, brilliantly portraying the vast political, spiritual, and material crisis of the Civil War as reflected in the lives and writings of some thirty representative Americans. Figures discussed include Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, among many others.

Examines the relationship between the political/social climate during which books were written and the works themselves. This volume focuses on classical literature.

Paul Fussell s award-winning landmark study of World War I, originally published in 1975, remains as original and gripping today as ever but now, for the first time, his literary and illuminating account comes in a beautifully illustrated edition. World War I changed a generation, ushered in the modern era, and revolutionized how we see the world. By drawing from a variety of primary sources including personal correspondence, newspapers, and literary works Fussell brings the period alive. Not only does he give us a more profound understanding of what the Great War meant to the people who lived through it, he also analyzes our modern perception of its impact. The wide selection of rare and fascinating images (approximately 160 of them) includes photographs, illustrations, and maps from period books, magazines, newspapers, advertisements, and other publications. Not only do they heighten the impact of Fussell s remarkable critical interpretation, they help us fully grasp the true scope of this aptly named and catastrophic war.

A unique and comprehensive account of attitudes to slavery in ancient Greece and Rome.

Each of these 22 tales relate the exploits and personalities of a fictional platoon of American soldiers in Vietnam.

Alexander the Great, according to Plutarch, carried on his campaigns a copy of the Iliad, kept alongside a dagger; on a more pronounced ideological level, ancient Romans looked to the Aeneid as an argument for imperialism. In this major reinterpretation of epic poetry beginning with Virgil, David Quint explores the political context and meanings of key works in Western literature. He divides the history of the genre into two political traditions: the Virgilian epics of conquest and empire that take the victors' side (the Aeneid itself, Camoes's Lusíadas, Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata) and the countervailing epic of the defeated and of republican liberty (Lucan's Pharsalia, Ercilla's Araucana, and d'Aubigné's Les tragiques). These traditions produce opposing ideas of historical narrative: a linear, teleological narrative that belongs to the imperial conquerors, and an episodic and open-ended narrative identified with "romance," the story told of and by the defeated. Quint situates Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained within these rival traditions. He extends his political analysis to the scholarly revival of medieval epic in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to Sergei Eisenstein's epic film, Alexander Nevsky. Attending both to the topical contexts of individual poems and to the larger historical development of the epic genre, Epic and Empire provides new models for exploring the relationship between ideology and literary form.

Winner of the 2015 LGBT Studies Award presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation Unearths connections between homoeroticism, cannibalism, and cultures of consumption in the context of American literature and US slave culture that has largely been ignored until now Scholars of US and transatlantic slavery have largely ignored or dismissed accusations that Black Americans were cannibalized. Vincent Woodard takes the enslaved person's claims of human consumption seriously, focusing on both the literal starvation of the slave and the tropes of cannibalism on the part of the slaveholder, and further draws attention to the ways in which Blacks experienced their consumption as a fundamentally homoerotic occurrence. The Delectable Negro explores these connections between homoeroticism, cannibalism, and cultures of consumption in the context of American literature and US slave culture. Utilizing many staples of African American literature and culture, such as the slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass, as well as other less circulated materials like James L. Smith's slave narrative, runaway slave advertisements, and numerous articles from Black newspapers published in the nineteenth century, Woodard traces the racial assumptions, political aspirations, gender codes, and philosophical frameworks that dictated both European and white American arousal towards Black males and hunger for Black male flesh. Woodard uses these texts to unpack how slaves struggled not only against social consumption, but also against endemic mechanisms of starvation and hunger designed to break them. He concludes with an examination of the controversial chain gang oral sex scene in Toni Morrison's Beloved, suggesting that even at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century, we are still at a loss for language with which to describe Black male hunger within a plantation culture of consumption.

Capital: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole was prepared by Friedrich Engels from notes left by Karl Marx and published in 1894. Das Kapital is best known today for this part, which says that as the organic fixed capital requirements of production rise as a result of advancements in production generally, the rate of profit tends to fall. Karl Marx (1818–1883) was a famous German philosopher, economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist.

Mark Twain is still one of the most enduring and beloved of America's great writers. In this guide to Twain, his life and times and the historical context in which he operated Shelley Fisher Fishkin assembles original essays by leading scholars that describe and define the man.

Examines the meaning and possibilities of the present and its relationship to history and historicity in the writings of several familiar figures in antebellum US literary history.