*English Language & Literature

How Freud's concept of the super-ego can help us to understand the harsh cultural climate of the digital age Cancellation, scapegoating, raving on Twitter. How did the Internet, which began as a place for open thought and exchange, become a forum for cruelty and judgment? Can a whole culture become mentally ill? How do we understand and respond to this problem? Mark Edmundson views contemporary culture and discourse through Freud's concept of the super-ego, the moralistic and frequently irrational inner judge. The poet William Blake was attuned to this "dark pressure of self-condemnation," and Nietzsche knew its power as well. One way to mitigate (temporarily) the self-judgment of the super-ego is to aim it outward instead, judging and even punishing others for supposed infractions. Naturally these targets fight back, resulting in a cascade of bitterness and even hatred. Edmundson traces the destructive passion of the super-ego on politics, race, gender, class, education, and more, drawing on psychological studies, classroom experience, and the work of Adam Phillips and Slavoj Zizek. Edmundson proposes ways to manage the super-ego and even to transform it into an affirmative power. In The Age of Guilt , Edmundson renews the promise of Freudian theory as he explores our unique social moment with psychological insight, humanity, and erudition.

Bright: A Memoir, the first full-length essay collection from acclaimed poet Kiki Petrosino, is a work of lyric nonfiction, offering glimpses of a life lived between cultural worlds. "Bright," a slang term used to describe light-skinned people of interracial American ancestry, becomes the starting point for an extended meditation on the author's upbringing in a mixed Black and Italian American family. Alternating moments of memoir, archival research, close reading and reverie, this work contemplates the enduring, deeply personal legacies of enslavement and racial discrimination in America. Situated at the luminous crossroads where public and private histories collide, Bright asks important questions about love, heritage, identity and creativity.

Lord Byron was the most celebrated of all the Romantic poets. Troubled, handsome, sexually fluid, disabled, and transgressive, he wrote his way to international fame - and scandal - before finding a kind of redemption in the Greek Revolution. He also left behind the vast trove of thrilling letters (to friends, relatives, lovers, and more) that form the core of this remarkable biography. Published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Byron's death, and adopting a fresh approach, it explores his life and work through some of his best, most resonant correspondence. Each chapter opens with Byron's own voice - as if we have opened a letter from the poet himself - followed by a vivid account of the emotions and experiences that missive touches. This gripping life traces the meteoric trajectory of a poet whose brilliance shook the world and whose legacy continues to shape art and culture to this day.

Drawing on fiction, sociology, political speech, autobiography, and performance, Sandhya Shukla develops a living theory of Harlem, in which peoples of different backgrounds collide, interact, and borrow from each other, even while Blackness remains crucial.

An adrenaline-fueled story of lives upended and transformed by an unprecedented catastrophe To all appearances, the Larsen-Hall family has everything: healthy children, a stable marriage, a lucrative career for Brantley, and the means for Daphne to pursue her art full-time. Their deluxe new Miami life has just clicked into place when Luna--the world's first category 6 hurricane--upends everything they have taken for granted.   When the storm makes landfall, it triggers a descent of another sort. Their home destroyed, two of its members missing, and finances abruptly cut off, the family finds everything they assumed about their lives now up for grabs. Swept into a mass rush of evacuees from across the American South, they are transported hundreds of miles to a FEMA megashelter where their new community includes an insurance-agent-turned-drug dealer, a group of vulnerable children, and a dedicated relief worker trying to keep the peace. Will "normal" ever return?   A suspenseful read plotted on a vast national tapestry, The Displacements thrillingly explores what happens when privilege is lost and resilience is tested in a swiftly changing world.

Characters with disabilities are often overlooked in fiction, but many occupy central places in literature by celebrated authors like Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, J. M. Coetzee, Anita Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat, and others. These authors deploy disability to do important cultural work, writes Christopher Krentz in his innovative study, Elusive Kinship. Such representations not only relate to the millions of disabled people in the global South, but also make more vivid such issues as the effects of colonialism, global capitalism, racism and sexism, war, and environmental disaster. Krentz is the first to put the fields of postcolonial studies, studies of human rights and literature, and literary disability in conversation with each other in a book-length study. He enhances our appreciation of key texts of Anglophone postcolonial literature of the global South, including Things Fall Apart and Midnight's Children. In addition, he uncovers the myriad ways fiction gains energy, vitality, and metaphoric force from characters with extraordinary bodies or minds. Depicting injustices faced by characters with disabilities is vital to raising awareness and achieving human rights. Elusive Kinship nudges us toward a fuller understanding of disability worldwide.

How worldwide plant circulation and new botanical ideas enabled Americans to radically re-envision politics and society The Garden Politic argues that botanical practices and discourses helped nineteenth-century Americans engage pressing questions of race, gender, settler colonialism, and liberal subjectivity. In the early republic, ideas of biotic distinctiveness helped fuel narratives of American exceptionalism. By the nineteenth century, however, these ideas and narratives were unsettled by the unprecedented scale at which the United States and European empires prospected for valuable plants and exchanged them across the globe. Drawing on ecocriticism, New Materialism, environmental history, and the history of science--and crossing disciplinary and national boundaries--The Garden Politic shows how new ideas about cultivation and plant life could be mobilized to divergent political and social ends. Reading the work of influential nineteenth-century authors from a botanical perspective, Mary Kuhn recovers how domestic political issues were entangled with the global circulation and science of plants. The diversity of Harriet Beecher Stowe's own gardens contributed to the evolution of her racial politics and abolitionist strategies. Nathaniel Hawthorne's struggles in his garden inspired him to write stories in which plants defy human efforts to impose order. Radical scientific ideas about plant intelligence and sociality prompted Emily Dickinson to imagine a human polity that embraces kinship with the natural world. Yet other writers, including Frederick Douglass, cautioned that the most prominent political context for plants remained plantation slavery. The Garden Politic reveals how the nineteenth century's extractive political economy of plants contains both the roots of our contemporary environmental crisis and the seeds of alternative political visions.

Award-winning author Amber McBride lays bare the fears of being young and Black in America, in this middle-grade novel that has been compared to the work of Jordan Peele and praised as "brilliantly inventive storytelling" by Publishers Weekly. . In the future, a Black girl known only as Inmate Eleven is kept confined -- to be used as a biological match for the president's son, should he fall ill. She is called a Blue -- the color of sadness. She lives in a small-small room with her dog, who is going wolf more often - he's pacing and imagining he's free. Inmate Eleven wants to go wolf too--she wants to know why she feels so Blue and what is beyond her small-small room. In the present, Imogen lives outside of Washington DC. The pandemic has distanced her from everyone but her mother and her therapist. Imogen has intense phobias and nightmares of confinement. Her two older brothers used to help her, but now she's on her own, until a college student helps her see the difference between being Blue and sad, and Black and empowered. In this symphony of a novel, award-winning author Amber McBride lays bare the fears of being young and Black in America, and empowers readers to remember their voices and stories are important, especially when they feel the need to go wolf.

Stephen Cushman's Keep the Feast sings in the tradition of the psalmists and devotional poets, offering an intimate, ecstatic doxology, both exultant and indicting, spiritual and secular. His poems make prodigious and intrepid forays into the realms of history, sexuality, religious ardor, the imperiled planet, and the reasons for making art. At the heart of this three-part book lies the title poem, which takes as a formal model Psalm 119, the longest psalm in the Bible. In luminous verse, Cushman's speaker rejoices in the commitments of faith, finding in them a way of living with the paradoxes of twenty-first-century life and of holding belief in an often-unfathomable world.

This volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers readers a generous selection of the poetry upon which Byron's fame depended and his reputation now rests. It presents the poems in the chronological order in which they were published, working in almost every case from their first appearances in print. The Selected Writings include the entirety of Byron's two best-known works, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan, but the decision to work book-by-book means that they are presented not as unified works but as evolving serial publications, interspersed with other works published between installments or sequels. Alongside these two major works, wider representation is given to Byron's lyric poetry than has been typical in modern editions. Furthermore, in keeping with the 21st Century Oxford Authors series, the works are reproduced in something close to their original printed forms. Prioritizing the event of publication over that of composition, this volume offers a version of Byron close to how he would have been known to his original public. With extensive annotations, it emphasizes the social processes by which literary works come to exist in the world, particularly their publication and reception histories. The result is a fresh view of Byron's literary achievement and an impetus to further reading in the works of this extraordinary creative figure.

A beautifully written suite of personal essays on the value of not knowing. Moments of clarity are rare and fleeting; how can we become comfortable outside of them, in the more general condition of uncertainty within which we make our lives? Written by English professor Emily Ogden while her children were small, On Not Knowing forays into this rich, ambivalent space. Each of her sharply observed essays invites the reader to think with her about questions she can't set aside: not knowing how to give birth, to listen, to hold it together, to love. Unapologetically capacious in her range of reference and idiosyncratic in the canon she draws on, Ogden moves nimbly among the registers of experience, from the operation of a breast pump to the art of herding cattle; from one-night stands to the stories of Edgar Allan Poe; from kayaking near a whale to a psychoanalytic meditation on drowning. Committed to the accumulation of knowledge, Ogden nonetheless finds that knowingness for her can be a way of getting stuck, a way of not really living. Rather than the defensiveness of willful ignorance, On Not Knowing celebrates the defenselessness of not knowing yet--possibly of not knowing ever. Ultimately, this book shows how resisting the temptation of knowingness and embracing the position of not knowing becomes a form of love.

In 1971, orphan Marlise Schade-fourteen, anorectic, and evicted from the psychiatric hospital her trust fund can no longer support-finds herself alone in an ancestral home during a blizzard. Marlise's struggles to survive there become the focal point for a host of imperiled figures, living and dead, whose stories intersect with hers and with forces roiling the U.S. in the '70s. Decades later, on the brink of Trump's America, sixty-something Tee Handel is shaken by an inexplicable visitation. For years he's nursed a deep hurt over his breakup with a captivating artist, spending his days and nights in solitude tinkering with antique clocks. What's become of the artist, and how Tee reacts to his mysterious guest, testifies to the risk and inexorability of change. These two seemingly unrelated tales entwine to show how the wages of the past are always with us, as are the dangerous and redemptive consequences of secrets confided and withheld.

Like gardens, sculptures, paintings, and architecture, Fowler argues, poems are cultural artifacts designed to appeal to our divergent human bodies. As we move through the built environment, we draw on our achieved expertise in negotiating its complex instructions to us. So it is when we read. All art mobilizes our bodily expertise, deploying sophisticated conventions and entangling the virtual with the real. As we engage with them, poems, like other artifacts, support skilled collaborations of the sensate (our perceiving flesh) and the sensible (the perceptible properties of the artifact), further developing our kinesthetic and cultural expertise. In ten essays, this book explores a range of works by poets from Geoffrey Chaucer and John Milton to Seamus Heaney and Tracy K. Smith, and by artists from Jean de Touyl and Nicholas Stone to Antonin Mercié and Kara Walker. Fowler calls the sphere of interaction between us and such artifacts "the flesh of art," signaling the phenomenological nature of her approach. She theorizes how interactions with art enflesh and acculturate us, making art a primary means through which we orient ourselves in spatiality and work out our places in the social world. Writing poetics at the juncture between aesthetics and politics, Fowler concludes with 43 theses in manifesto. Poetry and the Built Environment insistently demonstrates art's ability to shape us. In poetry, Fowler argues, we see how, especially when the transparency and sensibleness of the world are under stress, art equips us with strategies for transformation.

In Sissy Insurgencies, Marlon B. Ross focuses on the figure of the sissy in order to rethink how Americans have imagined, articulated, and negotiated manhood and boyhood from the 1880s to the present. Rather than collapsing sissiness into homosexuality, Ross shows how sissiness constitutes a historically fluid range of gender practices that are expressed as a physical manifestation, discursive epithet, social identity, and political phenomenon. He reconsiders several black leaders, intellectuals, musicians, and athletes within the context of sissiness, from Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and James Baldwin to Little Richard, Amiri Baraka, and Wilt Chamberlain. Whether examining Washington's practice of cleaning as an iteration of sissiness, Baldwin's self-fashioned sissy deportment, or sissiphobia in professional sports and black nationalism, Ross demonstrates that sissiness can be embraced and exploited to conform to American gender norms or disrupt racialized patriarchy. In this way, sissiness constitutes a central element in modern understandings of race and gender.

Small Pieces is a collaboration between novelist Micheline Aharonian Marcom and writer and visual artist Fowzia Karimi, pairing Marcom's short stories--miniatures as Marcom calls them--with Karimi's watercolors. The work is a conversation between two artists in text and image, side by side.

A mystical, transcendent poetry collection about Black womanhood in the American South In Thick with Trouble, award-winning poet Amber McBride interrogates if being "trouble"-difficult, unruly, fearsome, defiant-is ultimately a weakness or an incomparable source of strength. Steeped in the Hoodoo spiritual tradition and organized via reimagined tarot cards, this collection becomes a chorus of unapologetic women who laugh, cry, mesmerize, and bring outsiders to their knees. Summoning the supernatural to examine death, rebirth, and life outside the male gaze, Amber McBride has crafted a haunting, spellbinding, and strikingly original collection of poems that reckon with the force and complexity of Black womanhood.

They Both Die at the End meets The Bell Jar in this haunting, beautiful young adult novel-in-verse about clinical depression and healing from trauma, from National Book Award Finalist Amber McBride. Whimsy is back in the hospital for treatment of clinical depression. When she meets a boy named Faerry, she recognizes they both have magic in the marrow of their bones. And when Faerry and his family move to the same street, the two start to realize that their lifelines may have twined and untwined many times before. They are both terrified of the forest at the end of Marsh Creek Lane. The Forest whispers to Whimsy. The Forest might hold the answers to the part of Faerry he feels is missing. They discover the Forest holds monsters, fairy tales, and pain that they have both been running from for 11 years.