Outlines of St. Lucia's history

Sample

Dennis Must

"Honor, an orphan, finds her way to the Victorian boarding house where she thinks her mother might have birthed her. World War II has just ended, which alerted many Americans to the world beyond, but Honor and Billy's lives are limited to the dead-end town of DeForest Junction, Ohio, and its nearby notcherie, where exotic wemen sell their bodies to the rail men. Alongside her mixed-race 'cousin' Billy, Honor grows to womanhood, cared for by Miss Alsada and enchanted by the colorful stories of the shanty store owner, Mr. Augustus Willard, who claims to have traveled far and wide. One day, an itinerant blues musician shows up at the boardinghouse, electrifying Billy with his skill at the upright piano. He departs just as quickly, leaving behind hints that he might be Billy's father. Soon after Buster Stanley's departure, men in white hoods burn a cross in the field behind the boardinghouse and torch a number of shacks occupied by black families. Honor and Billy decide to leave DeForest Junction -- a feat they accomplish with the help of Mr. Willard, whose shanty store was burned. With Honor disguised as a boy for safety's sake, the three friends ride the rails southward, their ultimate destination: New Orleans. Billy is on the trail of Buster Stanley, but Honor is on an intense quest for Honor. How will she escape that fate of those wemen, waiting for a man to fill up the void in her life?"--Back cover.

Sample

Laurence W. Mazzeno

"Alfred Tennyson: The Critical Legacy explores the critics' reaction to the work of the nineteenth-century English poet most closely associated with the Victorian era. Perhaps more than any other Victorian poet, Tennyson's reputation has waxed and waned in the century since his death. He has been alternatively sanctified and vilified for his choice of subject matter, social outlook, morality, and techniques of versification. Individual poems have been at times celebrated as the greatest examples of their genre or condemned as contrived tours de force that warrant little critical attention. The poet's reputation has weathered even the most vitriolic attempts to discredit both the man and his writings; and as criticism of the late twentieth century demonstrates, Tennyson's claim to pre-eminence among the Victorians is now unchallenged." "In this narrative analysis of the critical tradition, Laurence Mazzeno begins with an examination of ways Tennyson was regarded by his contemporaries, before launching a detailed examination of twentieth-century criticism. A chapter is devoted to the period immediately following Tennyson's death, when a generation of post-Victorians reacted violently against what they considered his sappy sentimentalism, cloying moralism, and insensitive jingoism. Subsequent chapters describe ways critics resurrected Tennyson from the reactionaries, highlighting both his technical mastery and his ability to critique the society that had embraced him so dearly."--BOOK JACKET.

Sample

Paula T. Connolly

Long seen by writers as a vital political force of the nation, children's literature has been an important means not only of mythologizing a certain racialized past but also, because of its intended audience, of promoting a specific racialized future. Stories about slavery for children have served as primers for racial socialization. This first comprehensive study of slavery in children's literature, Slavery in American Children's Literature, 1790-2010, also historicizes the ways generations of authors have drawn upon antebellum literature in their own re-creations of slavery.

Sample

Richard F. Teichgraeber III

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau have traditionally been portrayed as alienated outsiders, isolated voices of opposition to a society that failed to heed their words. More recently, they have been seen as unwitting advocates of capitalist culture, their texts and careers driven by its hidden logic even as they indicted its excesses. In Sublime Thoughts/Penny Wisdom Richard F. Teichgraeber III rejects both of these views to offer a revisionist account of the relation of Emerson and Thoreau to the emerging market culture of antebellum America. Emerson and Thoreau, Teichgraeber argues, engaged their contemporary readers in a common conversation about the institutions, conduct, and moral fiber of a Northern society experiencing radical social changes and, in Southern slavery, encountering a dramatic challenge to its political values and economic way of life. Teichgraeber contends that Emerson and Thoreau knew their own purposes as social critics and set about achieving them in their published writings. In turn, the new mediators of antebellum culture - commercial publishers, editors, reviewers, and booksellers - successfully marketed the two Concord writers to a broad range of ordinary readers, discussed their works with surprising discernment, and constructed the images by which Emerson and Thoreau would eventually be canonized in American literature.