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Anecdotes of Enlightenment is the first literary history of the anecdote in English. In this wide-ranging account, James Robert Wood explores the animating effects anecdotes had on intellectual and literary cultures over the long eighteenth century. Drawing on extensive archival research and emphasizing the anecdote as a way of thinking, he shows that an intimate relationship developed between the anecdote and the Enlightenment concept of human nature. Anecdotes drew attention to odd phenomena on the peripheries of human life and human history. Enlightenment writers developed new and often contentious ideas of human nature through their efforts to explain these anomalies. They challenged each other's ideas by reinterpreting each other's anecdotes and by telling new anecdotes in turn. Anecdotes of Enlightenment features careful readings of the philosophy of John Locke and David Hume; the periodical essays of Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Eliza Haywood; the travel narratives of Joseph Banks, James Cook, and James Boswell; the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth; and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Written in an engaging style and spotlighting the eccentric aspects of Enlightenment thought, this fascinating book will appeal to historians, philosophers, and literary critics interested in the intellectual culture of the long eighteenth century.

Black Cosmopolitans examines the lives and thought of three extraordinary black men-Jacobus Capitein, Jean-Baptiste Belley, and John Marrant-who traveled extensively throughout the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Unlike millions of uprooted Africans and their descendants at the time, these men did not live lives of toil and sweat in the plantations of the New World. Marrant was born free, while Capitein and Belley became free when young, and this freedom gave them not only mobility but also the chance to make significant contributions to print culture. As public intellectuals, Capitein, Belley, and Marrant developed a cosmopolitan vision of the world anchored in the republican ideals of civic virtue and communal life, and so helped radicalize the calls for freedom that were emerging from the Enlightenment.Relying on sources in English, French, and Dutch, Christine Levecq shows that Calvinism, the French Revolution, and freemasonry were major inspirations for this republicanism. By exploring these cosmopolitan men's connections to their black communities, she argues that the eighteenth-century Atlantic world fostered an elite of black thinkers who took advantage of surrounding ideologies to spread a message of universal inclusion and egalitarianism.

In her gripping study of unsung female narratives of the Algerian War, Mildred Mortimer excavates and explores the role of women's individual and collective memory in recording events of the violent anticolonial conflict.

Moving from France to the Caribbean to the American continent, Creole Drama follows the people that created and sustained French theatre culture in New Orleans from its inception in 1792 until the beginning of the Civil War.

Contending that conflict is inevitable when an established power does not make sufficient room for a rising power, some conclude that the United States and China are on a collision course. In this timely new work, renowned professor of international relations Amitai Etzioni points to the paths by which the two nations can avoid war.

Taking its cue from Perry Miller's 1956 classic of American literary criticism, The Raven and the Whale, Caroline Chamberlin Hellman examines ways in which contemporary multi-ethnic American writers of the United States have responded to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts historically central to the American literary canon.

Opens a window into Spanish-Language writing produced by Spanish American exiles, travellers, and immigrants who settled and passed through Philadelphia during the early nineteenth century, when the city's printing presses offered a vehicle for the voices advocating independence in the shadow of Spanish colonialism.

From Zora Neale Hurston to Derek Walcott to Toni Morrison, New World black authors have written about African-derived religious traditions and spiritual practices. The Sacred Act of Reading examines religion and sociopolitical power in modern and contemporary texts of a variety of genres from the black Americas.

In this powerful memoir, Charles Dew, one of America's most respected historians of the South--and particularly its history of slavery--turns the focus on his own life, which began not in the halls of enlightenment but in a society unequivocally committed to segregation. Dew re-creates the midcentury American South of his childhood--in many respects a boy's paradise, but one stained by Lost Cause revisionism and, worse, by the full brunt of Jim Crow. Through entertainments and "e;educational"e; books that belittled African Americans, as well as the living examples of his own family, Dew was indoctrinated in a white supremacy that, at best, was condescendingly paternalistic and, at worst, brutally intolerant. The fear that southern culture, and the "e;hallowed white male brotherhood,"e; could come undone through the slightest flexibility in the color line gave the Jim Crow mindset its distinctly unyielding quality. Dew recalls his father, in most regards a decent man, becoming livid over a black tradesman daring to use the front, and not the back, door.The second half of the book shows how this former Confederate youth and descendant of Thomas Roderick Dew, one of slavery's most passionate apologists, went on to reject his racist upbringing and become a scholar of the South and its deeply conflicted history. The centerpiece of Dew's story is his sobering discovery of a price circular from 1860--an itemized list of humans up for sale. Contemplating this document becomes Dew's first step in an exploration of antebellum Richmond's slave trade that investigates the terrible--but, to its white participants, unremarkable--inhumanity inherent in the institution.Dew's wish with this book is to show how the South of his childhood came into being, poisoning the minds even of honorable people, and to answer the question put to him by Illinois Browning Culver, the African American woman who devoted decades of her life to serving his family: "e;Charles, why do the grown-ups put so much hate in the children?"e;

How should we respond to the moral and ethical challenges of our times? What are our individual and collective responsibilities in advancing the principles of democracy and justice? Charlottesville 2017 brings together the work of UVA faculty members to examine their community's history more deeply and more broadly.

Offers a comprehensive analysis of Edwidge Danticat's exploration of the dialogic relationship between nation and diaspora. NadTHge T. Clitandre argues that Danticat - moving between novels, short stories, and essays - articulates a diasporic consciousness that acts as a social, political, and cultural transformation at the local and global level.

Argues that the fear of infected books energized aesthetic and political debates about the power of reading, which could alter individual and social bodies by connecting people of all sorts in dangerous ways through print.

Gossip - long derided and dismissed by writers and intellectuals - is far from frivolous. In Idle Talk, Deadly Talk, Ana Rodriguez Navas reveals gossip to be an urgent, utilitarian, and deeply political practice - a means of staging the narrative tensions, and waging the narrative battles, that mark Caribbean politics and culture.

Analyses work written since the year 2000 by thirteen North American poets, all of whom push the bounds of literary convention as they seek forms and language adequate to complex environmental problems. These poets respond to environments transformed by people and take "nature" to be a far more inclusive and culturally imbricated category than conventional nature poetry does.

Climate disruption is often discussed on a global scale, affording many a degree of detachment from what is happening in their own backyards. Yet the consequences of global warming are of an increasingly acute and serious nature.In Virginia Climate Fever, environmental journalist Stephen Nash brings home the threat of climate change to the state of Virginia. Weaving together a compelling mix of data and conversations with both respected scientists and Virginians most immediately at risk from global warming's effects, the author details how Virginia's climate has already begun to change. In engaging prose and layman's terms, Nash argues that alteration in the environment will affect not only the state's cities but also hundreds of square miles of urban and natural coastal areas, the 60 percent of the state that is forested, the Chesapeake Bay, and the near Atlantic, with accompanying threats such as the potential spread of infectious disease. The narrative offers striking descriptions of the vulnerabilities of the state's many beautiful natural areas, around which much of its tourism industry is built.While remaining respectful of the controversy around global warming, Nash allows the research to speak for itself. In doing so, he offers a practical approach to and urgent warning about the impending impact of climate change in Virginia.

This work reconstructs life for soldiers from the region on the battlefield and for civilians in the homes of southeastern Virginia, providing a depiction of what life was like for the ordinary person - black, white, soldier, or Unionist - contending with the hardships of the Civil War.

Examines a group of early nineteenth-century novels by white creoles, writers whose identities and perspectives were shaped by their experiences in Britain's Caribbean colonies. White creoles faced a considerable challenge in showing they were driven by more than a desire for power and profit. Crossing the Line explores the integral role early creole novels played in this cultural labour.

This text argues that the aggressive nationalism of James Thomson's ode "Rule Britannia!" (1740), is the condition to which much English poetry of the late 17th and 18th centuries aspires. Poets as varied as Marvell, Waller, Dryden and Defoe, all wrote poems deeply engaged with the British nation.

The first novel of the Haitian novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis, General Sun, My Brother appears here for the first time in English. Its depiction of the nightmarish journey of the unskilled laborer Hilarion and his wife from the slums of Port-au-Prince to the cane fields of the Dominican Republic has brought comparisons to the work of Emile Zola, André Malraux, Richard Wright, and Ernest Hemingway.Alexis, whose mother was a descendant of the Revolutionary General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, was already a mature thinker when he published General Sun, My Brother (Compère Général Soleil) in France in 1955. A militant Marxist himself, Alexis championed a form of the "marvelous realism" developed by the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, who called for a vision of historical reality from the standpoint of slaves for whom the supernatural was as much a part of everyday experience as were social and other existential realities. General Sun, My Brother opens as Hilarion is arrested for stealing a wallet and imprisoned with an activist named Pierre Roumel--a fictional double for the novelist Jacques Roumain--who schools him in the Marxist view of history. On his release, Hilarion meets Claire-Heureuse and they settle down together. Hilarion labors in sisal processing and mahogany polishing while his partner sets up a small grocery store. After losing everything in a criminally set fire, the couple joins the desperate emigration to the Dominican Republic. Hilarion finds work as a sugarcane cutter, but the workers soon become embroiled in a strike that ends in the "Dominican Vespers," the 1937 massacre pf Haitian workers by the Dominican army. The novel personifies the sun as the ally, brother, and leader of the peasants. Mortally wounded in crossing the Massacre River back into Haiti, Hilarion urges Claire-Heureuse to remarry and to continue to work for a Haiti where people can live in dignity and peace.

This work traces the moral meaning of pleasure in libertine works of 18th-century France. The author contends that libertine works are linked by an ""ethics of pleasure"" that teaches readers that vanity and sensual enjoyment are part of their moral being.

The debate over the value of community-based environmental collaboration is one that dominates current discussions of the management of public lands and other resources. In Community-Based Collaboration: Bridging Socio-Ecological Research and Practice, contributors offer an in-depth interdisciplinary exploration of what attracts people to this collaborative mode.

This work charts the travels of the figure of the wild man through the invented domain of the bourgeois public sphere. He is followed through the discursive networks of novels, broadsheets, pamphlets and advertisements and through fair booths, the Royal Society and Parliament.

This text describes the introduction, evolution, demise and final abolition of slavery in Delaware. The author uncovers why Delaware, a staunch Unionist state during the Civil War, failed to abolish slavery until 1901 and repeatedly denied its black citizens the right to vote.

Reveals that black slavery's emergence in Barbados preceded the rise of sugar; in doing so Russell Menard both reverses the long-held understanding of slavery as a consequence of the island's economic boom and repositions the impact that this surge of slavery had on America's slave trade.

Following Congress's approval of the creation of Shenandoah National Park in 1926, displaced Virginia mountain families wrote to US government officials requesting various services, property, and harvested crops. The collection of 300 handwritten letters that resulted from this relocation reveals a complex dynamic between the people and the government.

Offers a ready reference to Madison's thought, including his most perceptive observations on government and human nature. The compendium brings together excerpts from his writings on a variety of political and social issues, ranging from agriculture to free trade, from religion and the state to legislative power, from friendship to fashion, from slavery to unity.