University of New Hampshire Press: Open Access Books
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The Greening of Faith: God, the Environment, and the Good Life (20th Anniversary Edition)
John E. Carroll, Paul Brockelman, and Mary Westfall
The recent release of Pope Francis’s much-discussed encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, has reinforced environmental issues as also moral and spiritual issues. This anthology, twenty years ahead of the encyclical but very much in line with its agenda, offers essays by fifteen philosophers, theologians, and environmentalists who argue for a response to ecology that recognizes the tools of science but includes a more spiritual approach—one with a more humanistic, holistic view based on inherent reverence toward the natural world. Writers whose orientations range from Buddhism to evangelical Christianity to Catholicism to Native American beliefs explore ways to achieve this paradigm shift and suggest that “the environment is not only a spiritual issue, but the spiritual issue of our time.”
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Convict Voices: Women, Class, and Writing about Prison in Nineteenth-Century England
Anne Schwan
In this lively study of the development and transformation of voices of female offenders in nineteenth-century England, Anne Schwan analyzes a range of colorful sources, including crime broadsides, reform literature, prisoners' own writings about imprisonment and courtroom politics, and conventional literary texts, such as Adam Bede and The Moonstone. Not only does Schwan demonstrate strategies for interpreting ambivalent and often contradictory texts, she also provides a carefully historicized approach to the work of feminist recovery. Crossing class lines, genre boundaries, and gender roles in the effort to trace prisoners, authors, and female communities (imagined or real), Schwan brings new insight to what it means to locate feminist (or protofeminist) details, arguments, and politics. In this case, she tracks the emergence of a contested, and often contradictory, feminist consciousness, through the prism of nineteenth-century penal debates. The historical discussion is framed by reflections on contemporary debates about prisoner perspectives to illuminate continuities and differences. Convict Voices offers a sophisticated approach to interpretive questions of gender, genre, and discourse in the representation of female convicts and their voices and viewpoints. -- Provided by publisher.
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Asian Americans in New England: Culture and Community
Monica E. Chiu
This collection, the first to address Asian and Asian Americans' contributions to New England, highlights a broad range of Asian American communities and historical experiences. From the poignant writings of a young Chinese immigrant to the influence of hip-hop in a New Hampshire Lao community, this original and unique collection seeks to establish a regional template for the study of Asian American lives and art far from the West Coast. These essays provide not just a record of particular achievements but a full and vigorous engagement with Asian American culture along with an analysis of the depiction of Asian Americans in New England. This is an important and timely collection highlighting the creativity and diversity of one of the fastest-growing minority populations in the region.
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Capital Speculations: Writing and Building Washington, D.C.
Sarah Luria
In this lively study, Sarah Luria pursues the vital political connection between architecture and literature in the formation in 1791 of America's grand new capital city. City planners believed that designing Washington, D.C. as a physical model of the Constitution and its balance of powers would help citizens bond with the newly created nation. Although wildly ambitious, this design was made feasible through financial speculation. Dazzled by the plans for an "American Rome," citizens would buy up its empty lots and make the nation's capital their home. Luria demonstrates how political and financial speculation combined to build Washington and, once established, how the capital became a stage for the visions of subsequent reformers.
Luria examines five political reformers and the Washington sites they used to promote their ideas: George Washington and the design of the "Federal City"; Abraham Lincoln and the enlargement of the Capitol dome during the Civil War; Walt Whitman and the capital's Civil War hospitals; Frederick Douglass and his impressive estate overlooking the Capitol; and Henry Adams and the double house that he built with poet-statesman John Hay on Lafayette Square. Although each author's work describes a different dynamic relationship between text and physical space, all five combine political speculation and marketplace psychology. They construct their visions and attract investment in them through their novelty, boldness, and extravagant scale.
Clarifying the dynamic relations among discourse, economics, politics, and the built environment, Luria's book demonstrates how keenly architectural history is interwoven into American literary and political life. -
At Home in the City: Urban Domesticity in American Literature and Culture, 1850-1930
Elizabeth Klima
An interdisciplinary study of urban literature and domestic architecture in the United States from 1850-1930. With chapters on the hotel, Central Park, tenement houses, and apartment buildings, At Home in the City juxtaposes literary criticism with a history of the built environment to show the inception of American modernity. Works treated include: The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ruth Hall by Fanny Fern, The Bostonians by Henry James, How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis, Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser, The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's feminist urban utopias, and Nella Larsen's Quicksand.
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After Franklin: The Emergence of Autobiography in Post-Revolutionary America
Stephen Carl Arch
This book describes the development of autobiography as a distinct genre of literature in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in the United States. It analyzes important print and manuscript autobiographies like Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography and Alexander Graydon's Memoirs of a Life.