Aesthetics and Form in Charles Darwin’s Writings
Ian Duncan
Aesthetic modes and categories of perception and judgement were crucial to the development of Charles Darwin’s “theory of descent with modification through natural selection.” Indeed, ...
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Alvarez de Toledo y Dubois, José
Nicolás Kanellos
José Alvarez de Toledo y Dubois (1779–1858) was either a freedom-fighter turned traitor to the cause of Mexican independence or a spy for the Spanish empire at a time of intense ...
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American Renaissance
David S. Reynolds
The richest period in American literary history, the American Renaissance (1830–1865) produced Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, ...
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Beginnings and Endings
Eyal Segal
Each temporal sequence (specifically, in language) has its own structure and dynamics, but the beginning and the ending may be said to be universally important or significant points within ...
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Border and la frontera in the US–Mexico Borderlands
Alicia Arrizón
In the U.S.–Mexico context, the concepts of the border, borderlands, and la frontera represent their ongoing complex geopolitical, cultural, and historical relations. With the signing of ...
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British Detective Fiction in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries
Anne Humpherys
From ancient Greece on, fictional narratives have entailed deciphering mystery. Sophocles’ Oedipus must solve the mystery of the plague decimating Thebes; the play is a dramatization of ...
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Californio testimonios
Rosaura Sánchez
Several 19th-century Californio testimonios are the product of interviews of Californio men and women made by H. H. Bancroft’s agents, looking for historical information that would be ...
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Caribbean and Southern Literatures
John Wharton Lowe
Transnationalism and Global Studies have exploded old notions of artificial cultural boundaries, opening to view the myriad cross currents between the U.S. South and the Caribbean. Thus, ...
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The Chapter in Western Literature
Nicholas Dames
First known as a kephalaion in Greek, capitulum or caput in Latin, the chapter arose in antiquity as a finding device within long, often heterogenous prose texts, prior even to the advent ...
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The Chinese Exclusion Act and Early Asian American Literature
Ben Railton
The 19th century featured two opposed yet interconnected historical trends: the growth of a multigenerational and deeply rooted Chinese American community; and the development of the ...
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Circulating Libraries in the Victorian Era
Troy J. Bassett
Beginning in the 18th century and continuing throughout the 19th century, circulating libraries became an integral part of the literary marketplace as the chief means of distributing ...
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Class and Poverty in Southern Literature
Carsten Schinko
The South has generated a unique set of myths, which are often at odds with the dominant Puritan-bred tales of American exceptionalism. If the North had to downplay vertical visions of the ...
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Colonial Australian Gothic Literature
Ken Gelder
Frontier colonial Gothic literature in Australia gives expression to the experience and aftermath of violent encounters between settlers and Indigenous people on the frontier. This ...
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Copyright and the Commodification of Authorship in 18th- and 19th-Century Europe
Maurizio Borghi
The modern concept of authorship evolved in parallel with the legal recognition of the author as the subject of certain property rights within the marketplace for books. Such a market was ...
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Domesticity in Victorian Literature
Monica F. Cohen
When Victorian writers talked about the home, they invoked a range of contested ideas and complex affects about the material and imagined space where self and society meet. Emerging as a ...
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Early African American Print Culture
Eric Gardner
Not until the end of the 20th century did scholars begin to look at early African American print culture in the depth it deserves. A story painfully intertwined with the transatlantic ...
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Early Japanese American Literature, 1815–1900
Andrew Way Leong
Early Japanese American literature is not just the sum total of literary works written by the first persons of Japanese descent in the United States. Nor is it just a set of texts where ...
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Emigration and 19th-Century British Colonial Settler Narratives
Tamara S. Wagner
Colonial settler narratives comprise chiefly fictional as well as autobiographically inspired or anecdotal writing about emigration and settler life. The 19th century saw an increasingly ...
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The European Circulation of Nordic Texts in the Romantic Period
Robert W. Rix
From the 1750s until the 1840s, the interest in Icelandic manuscripts of mythology and heroic sagas, as well as various forms of Nordic folklore, entered a new phase. One of the central ...
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The Expanded Market for Fiction in American Periodicals, 1865–1914
Charles Johanningsmeier
During the years between 1865 and 1914, the United States became a nation of periodical readers, as a greatly expanded number of newspapers and magazines—many of which contained fictional ...
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