University Of Virginia Press: 345 books

Using the term "prophetic remembrance" to articulate the expression of a constituent faith in the performative capacity of language, Erica Still shows how black subjectivity is born of and interprets cultural trauma. She brings together African American neo-slave narratives and Black South African...

Pairing American intellectuals with European counterparts, Armin Mattes charts the simultaneous emergence of modern concepts of democracy and nationhood on both sides of the Atlantic during the age of revolutions.

Using the approaches of pure sociology and social geometry, Bradley Campbell argues that genocide is best understood not in terms of morality but as an attempt at social control—a response to perceived deviant behavior on the part of targeted victims.

In Earnestly Contending, Dickson Bruce examines the ways in which religious denominations and movements in antebellum America coped with the ideals of freedom and pluralism that exerted such a strong influence on the larger, national culture. Despite their enormous normative power, these still-evolving...

This ambitious book provides the only systematic examination of the American abolition movement’s direct impacts on antislavery politics from colonial times to the Civil War and after. As opposed to indirect methods such as propaganda, sermons, and speeches at protest meetings, Stanley Harrold focuses...

In the decades following the Revolution, the supernatural exploded across the American landscape—fabulous reports of healings, exorcisms, magic, and angels crossed the nation. Under First Amendment protections, new sects based on such miracles proliferated. At the same time, Enlightenment philosophers...

Duane Corpis here shows that religious conversion in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany was less a matter of private conscience than an act of disobedience through which men and women redefined their relationships to governmental, ecclesiastical, and familial authorities.

Presidents shape not only the course of history but also how Americans remember and retell that history. From the Oval Office they instruct us what to respect and what to reject in our past. They regale us with stories about who we are as a people, and tell us whom in the pantheon of greats we should...

Does every increase in the power of government entail a loss of liberty for the people? James H. Read examines how four key Founders--James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, James Wilson, and Thomas Jefferson--wrestled with this question during the first two decades of the American Republic. Power...

Crossing the Line 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. Colonial subjects residing in the West Indian colonies "beyond the line," these writers were perceived...

Raving at Usurers explores the complex intersection of religion, economics, ethics, and literature in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, providing a revisionist account of the financial revolution as well as radically new perspectives on Robinson Crusoe and Tom Jones.

This multiethnic examination of the legacy of violence shows how inherited traumatic memory is represented in novels by contemporary American women writers, revealing both the influence of specific cultural contexts and the solidarity of global witness to the suffering of others.

New translation of book on gardens in literary imagination by Prize-winning French author of Madame Proust, Madame Zola, and George Sand.

Kelly Josephs explores the prevalence of madness in Caribbean texts to show how it functions both as a critique of colonialism and as a literary innovation for representing national identity.