Larry J. Reynolds - Böcker

Nathaniel Hawthorne remains one of the most widely read and taught of American authors. This Historical Guide collects a number of original essays by Hawthorne scholars that place the author in historical context. Like other volumes in the series, A Historical Guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne includes an introduction, a brief biography, a bibliographical essay, and an illustrated chronology of the author's life and times. Combining cultural criticism with historical scholarship, this volume addresses a wide range of topics relevant to Hawthorne's work, including his relationship to slavery, children, mesmerism, and the visual arts.

Nathaniel Hawthorne remains one of the most widely read and taught of American authors. This Historical Guide collects a number of original essays by Hawthorne scholars that place the author in historical context. Like other volumes in the series, A Historical Guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne includes an introduction, a brief biography, a bibliographical essay, and an illustrated chronology of the author's life and times. Combining cultural criticism with historical scholarship, this volume addresses a wide range of topics relevant to Hawthorne's work, including his relationship to slavery, children, mesmerism, and the visual arts.

Political issues and events have always acted as a catalyst on thought and art. In this pioneering study, Larry J. Reynolds argues that the European revolutions of 1848-49 quickened the American literary imagination and shaped the characters, plots, and themes of the American renaissance. He traces the impact of the revolutions on Emerson, Fuller, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Thoreau, showing that the upheavals abroad both inspired and disturbed. Unlike many studies that have emphasized the national features and revolutionary spirit of our classic American literature, Reynolds's study, which places this literature in an international context, reveals its conservative, counterrevolutionary side.Emerson, the writer first considered, witnessed the revolutionary turmoil in England and France during the spring of 1848. Reynolds contends that Emerson disdained the revolutions but was unable to resist their challenge: they inspired him to articulate with renewed vigor the idealism at the center of his spiritual life. Reynolds describes next the "Bloody June Days" in Paris and examines their effect on American writings, particularly Uncle Tom's Cabin. In his discussion of Margaret Fuller, Reynolds compares her response to the socialist revolution with Emerson's and demonstrates that her Tribune dispatches from Italy, written during the Roman Revolution, constitute a powerful historical narrative of unrecognized artistry and value. Turning to the writings of Hawthorne and Melville, Reynolds explains that these authors, who viewed the revolutions skeptically, were moved to incorporate into their masterpieces the imagery and issues attracting public attention around them. Focusing on Whitman's fascination with the revolutionary events he covered as an editor, Reynolds describes how under their influence Whitman conceived himself as a poet of insurrection and began Leaves of Grass. He concludes with Thoreau, showing how residual excitement about the revolutions led to the reshaping of Walden into a spiritual autobiography emphasizing purity and serenity.

Margaret Fuller—journalist, critic, radical feminist, and political activist—traveled in Europe between 1846 and 1850 as a foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune. Her letters from England, France, and Italy, which began as engaging travel sketches, soon became moving accounts of the most widespread revolutionary upheaval within modern history. These dispatches are now reproduced in their entirety for the first timeFuller met important political figures wherever she traveled, including those who became leaders in the revolutions, and she actively allied herself with the republican cause. Her letters describe how from her apartment in Rome she saw the November 1848 attack on the Quirinal Palace, which precipitated the Pope’s flight from the city and the establishment of the Roman Republic headed by her friend Giuseppe Mazzini; how she and the Romans (who included her lover Giovanni Ossoli, a captain in the Civic Guard) suffered through the June 1849 siege and bombardment of Rome by the French army sent to restore the Pope; and how as director of a hospital on Tiber Island, she nursed the wounded who fell in the defense of the city.The dispatches, edited and annotated by Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith, are introduced by an essay explaining the historical and professional context in which the letters were written.

"Backgrounds" reveals the experiential basis for the text through autobiographical writings and selections from Fuller’s recently published letters, journals, and "Boston Conversations.""Criticism and Reviews" presents a superb selection of critical writing about the novel.The critics include Orestes A. Brownson, A. G. M, Lydia Maria Child, Frederic Dan Huntington, Edgar A. Poe, Charles Lane, George Eliot, Margaret Vanderhaar Allen, David M. Robinson, Bell Gale Chevigny, Julie Ellison, Christina Zwarg, and Jeffery Steele.A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are included.

"An outstanding combination of literary interpretation and cultural and historical context that will be an important addition to the critical literature on Hawthorne."---Nina Baym, University of Illinois"It is difficult to imagine a more timely book than Devils and Rebels. Examining the role of the public intellectual and writer during a time of political conflict and war, Reynolds takes up his charges with great precision and historical finesse. What particularly distinguishes this book is its attention to the ways in which one of this country's most important authors struggled to resist the waves of political extremism and patriotic hysteria that swept around him."---Jeffrey Steele, University of Wisconsin—Madison Widely condemned even in his own time, Nathaniel Hawthorne's views on abolitionism and slavery are today frequently characterized by scholars as morally reprehensible. Devils and Rebels explores the historical and biographical record to reveal striking evidence of the author's true political values---values grounded in pacifism and resistant to the kind of binary thinking that could lead to violence and war. The book offers fresh readings of not only Hawthorne's four major romances but also some of his less familiar works like "Legends of the Province House," The Whole History of Grandfather's Chair, Journal of an African Cruiser, The Life of Franklin Pierce, and "Septimius Felton." Reynolds argues that Hawthorne---whether in his politics or his art---drew upon racialized imagery from America's past revolution and war on witchcraft to create a politics of quiet imagination, alert to the ways in which New England righteousness could become totalitarian by imposing its narrow view of the world on others. Meticulously researched and cogently argued, this groundbreaking work demonstrates the need to examine perspectives and values from beyond the New England region when studying the literary history of the American Renaissance and illuminates the difficulties faced by public intellectuals during times of political strife---an issue as relevant today as it was some one hundred and fifty years ago. Larry J. Reynolds is Thomas Franklin Mayo Professor of Liberal Arts and Professor of English at Texas A&M University. His previous books include A Historical Guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne, National Imaginaries, American Identities: The Cultural Work of American Iconography, and European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance as well as an edition of the European writings of Margaret Fuller.

From the American Revolution to the present, the United States has enjoyed a rich and persuasive visual culture. These images have constructed, sustained, and disseminated social values and identities, but this unwieldy, sometimes untidy form of cultural expression has received less systematic attention than other modes of depicting American life. Recently, scholars in the humanities have developed a new critical approach to reading images and the cultural work they perform. This practice, American cultural iconography, is generating sophisticated analyses of how images organize our public life. The contributions to this volume exhibit the extraordinary scope and interpretive power of this interdisciplinary study while illuminating the dark corners of the nation's psyche. Drawing on such varied texts and visual media as daguerreotypes, political cartoons, tourist posters, and religious artifacts, these essays explore how pictures and words combine to teach us who we are and who we are not. They examine mimesis in elegant portraits of black Freemasons, industrial-age representations of national parks, and postwar photographs of atomic destruction.They consider how visual culture has described and disclosed the politics of racialized sexuality, whether subconsciously affirming it in the shadows of film noir or deliberately contesting it through the interethnic incest of John Sayles's Lone Star. Students of literature, film, and history will find that these essays extend the frontier of American studies. The contributors are Maurice Wallace, Dennis Berthold, Alan Trachtenberg, Shirley Samuels, Jenny Franchot, Cecelia Tichi, Eric Lott, Bryan C. Taylor, and Jose E. Limon.

This volume, growing out of the celebrated turn toward history in literary criticism, showcases some of the best new historical work being done today in textual theory, literary history, and cultural criticism. The collection brings together for the first time key representativesfrom various schools of historicist scholarship, including leading critics whose work has helped define new historicism. The essays illuminate literary periods ranging from Anglo-Saxon to postmodern, a variety of literary texts that includes The Siege of Thebes, Macbeth, The Jazz Singer, and The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, and central issues that have marked new historicism: power, ideology, textuality, othering, marginality, exile, and liberation. The contributors are Janet Aikins, Lawrence Buell, Ralph Cohen, Margaret Ezell, Stephen Greenblatt, Terence Hoagwood, Jerome McGann, Robert Newman, Katherine O'Keeffe, Lee Patterson, Michael Rogin, Edward Said, and Hortense Spillers. The editors' introduction situates the various essays within contemporary criticism and explores the multiple, contestatory issues at stake within the historicist enterprise.

Are you seeking to improve your school or district′s educational programs and services? Are you trying to raise the quality of the work environment for all staff? Then Successful Site-Based Management is for you. Get ready to effect real improvement at your school or in your district. Find out how your site-based management team can spend less time getting organized and establishing policies, and more time focusing on the substantive issues of school change. Don′t let your team′s good intentions be overcome by bureaucracy. Use the concrete, practical information in this hands-on guide to make site-based management work. Your team will learn: * The 9 essential skills required to support site-based management * The 25 steps to implementation * How to make it through the first few difficult weeks * How to recognize a school′s progress (or lack of it) * How to find the time to have a site-based management team * What site-based management has to do with student achievement Reynolds defines new roles and responsibilities for principals, central office personnel, and the site team. He explains the difference between leadership and management and shows how to develop leadership at every level. The book includes 50 worksheets to customize for any school management team in any school or district setting. It offers questions and activities to help identify a school′s particular issues, circumstances, and needs--so that school′s team can better serve its school. If your school is getting ready to implement site-based management, or if your district has mandated site-based management, this book can take your district, your school, and your team from status quo to school improvement.

Are you seeking to improve your school or district′s educational programs and services? Are you trying to raise the quality of the work environment for all staff? Then Successful Site-Based Management is for you. Get ready to effect real improvement at your school or in your district. Find out how your site-based management team can spend less time getting organized and establishing policies, and more time focusing on the substantive issues of school change. Don′t let your team′s good intentions be overcome by bureaucracy. Use the concrete, practical information in this hands-on guide to make site-based management work. Your team will learn: * The 9 essential skills required to support site-based management * The 25 steps to implementation * How to make it through the first few difficult weeks * How to recognize a school′s progress (or lack of it) * How to find the time to have a site-based management team * What site-based management has to do with student achievement Reynolds defines new roles and responsibilities for principals, central office personnel, and the site team. He explains the difference between leadership and management and shows how to develop leadership at every level. The book includes 50 worksheets to customize for any school management team in any school or district setting. It offers questions and activities to help identify a school′s particular issues, circumstances, and needs--so that school′s team can better serve its school. If your school is getting ready to implement site-based management, or if your district has mandated site-based management, this book can take your district, your school, and your team from status quo to school improvement.

Righteous Violence examines the struggles with the violence of slavery and revolution that engaged the imaginations of seven nineteenth-century American writers—Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville.These authors responded not only to the state terror of slavery and the Civil War but also to more problematic violent acts, including unlawful revolts, insurrections, riots, and strikes that resulted in bloodshed and death. Rather than position these writers for or against the struggle for liberty, Larry J. Reynolds examines the profoundly contingent and morally complex perspectives of each author. Tracing the shifting and troubled moral arguments in their work, Reynolds shows that these writers, though committed to peace and civil order, at times succumbed to bloodlust, even while they expressed ambivalence about the very violence they approved. For many of these authors, the figure of John Brown loomed large as an influence and a challenge. Reynolds examines key works such as Fuller’s European dispatches, Emerson’s political lectures, Douglass’s novella The Heroic Slave, Thoreau’s Walden, Alcott’s Moods, Hawthorne’s late unfinished romances, and Melville’s Billy Budd.In addition to demonstrating the centrality of righteous violence to the American Renaissance, this study deepens and complicates our understanding of political violence beyond the dichotomies of revolution and murder, liberty and oppression, good and evil.

Righteous Violence examines the struggles with the violence of slavery and revolution that engaged the imaginations of seven nineteenth-century American writers—Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville.These authors responded not only to the state terror of slavery and the Civil War but also to more problematic violent acts, including unlawful revolts, insurrections, riots, and strikes that resulted in bloodshed and death. Rather than position these writers for or against the struggle for liberty, Larry J. Reynolds examines the profoundly contingent and morally complex perspectives of each author. Tracing the shifting and troubled moral arguments in their work, Reynolds shows that these writers, though committed to peace and civil order, at times succumbed to bloodlust, even while they expressed ambivalence about the very violence they approved. For many of these authors, the figure of John Brown loomed large as an influence and a challenge. Reynolds examines key works such as Fuller’s European dispatches, Emerson’s political lectures, Douglass’s novella The Heroic Slave, Thoreau’s Walden, Alcott’s Moods, Hawthorne’s late unfinished romances, and Melville’s Billy Budd.In addition to demonstrating the centrality of righteous violence to the American Renaissance, this study deepens and complicates our understanding of political violence beyond the dichotomies of revolution and murder, liberty and oppression, good and evil.

Examining the most frequently taught works by key writers of the American Renaissance, including Poe, Emerson, Fuller, Douglass, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Jacobs, Stowe, Whitman, and Dickinson, this engaging and accessible book offers the crucial historical, social, and political contexts in which they must be studied. Larry J. Reynolds usefully groups authors together for more lively and fruitful discussion and engages with current as well as historical theoretical debates on the area. The book includes essential biographical and historical information to situate and contextualize the literature, and incorporates major relevant criticism in each chapter. Recommended readings for further study, along with a list of works cited, conclude each chapter.