Books published by University of Virginia Press

Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have transformed the Earth's atmosphere, committing our planet to more extreme weather, rising sea levels, melting polar ice caps, and mass extinction. This period of observable human impact on the Earth's ecosystems has been called the Anthropocene Age. The anthropogenic climate change that has impacted the Earth has also affected our literature, but criticism of the contemporary novel has not adequately recognized the literary response to this level of environmental crisis. Ecocriticism's theories of place and planet, meanwhile, are troubled by a climate that is neither natural nor under human control. Anthropocene Fictions is the first systematic examination of the hundreds of novels that have been written about anthropogenic climate change.Drawing on climatology, the sociology and philosophy of science, geography, and environmental economics, Adam Trexler argues that the novel has become an essential tool to construct meaning in an age of climate change. The novel expands the reach of climate science beyond the laboratory or model, turning abstract predictions into subjectively tangible experiences of place, identity, and culture. Political and economic organizations are also being transformed by their struggle for sustainability. In turn, the novel has been forced to adapt to new boundaries between truth and fabrication, nature and economies, and individual choice and larger systems of natural phenomena. Anthropocene Fictions argues that new modes of inhabiting climate are of the utmost critical and political importance, when unprecedented scientific consensus has failed to lead to action. Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism

Part of a series presenting public papers either written by George Washington or presented to him during both of his administrations. Volume 4 covers the autumn and early winter of 1789-90 and focuses on the problems facing the new administration.

The Limits of Optimism works to dispel persistent notions about Jefferson's allegedly paradoxical and sphinx-like quality. Maurizio Valsania shows that Jefferson's multifaceted character and personality are to a large extent the logical outcome of an anti-metaphysical, enlightened, and humility-oriented approach to reality. That Jefferson's mind and priorities changed over time and in response to changing circumstances indicates neither incoherence, hypocrisy, nor pathology.Valsania's reading of Jefferson, the Enlightenment, and negativity helps to make sense of the many paradoxes typically associated with that eighteenth-century thinker. At the same time, it provides a corrective to the common though erroneous equation of Enlightenment thinking with rationalism and shallow optimism.

This is an extended meditation on what many consider to be Dickens's and nineteenth-century England's greatest work of narrative fiction.

Brings together historians of political thought with classicists and historians of art and culture to find new approaches to the difficult questions raised by America's classical heritage. The essays explore the classical contribution to different aspects of Jefferson's thought and taste, as well as examining the significance of the ancient world to America in a broader historical context.

Exploring the interface between the cultural politics of the Black Power and the Black Arts movements and the production of postwar African American popular culture, Amy Ongiri shows how the reliance of Black politics on an oppositional image of African Americans was the formative moment in the construction of "e;authentic blackness"e; as a cultural identity. While other books have adopted either a literary approach to the language, poetry, and arts of these movements or a historical analysis of them, Ongiri's captures the cultural and political interconnections of the postwar period by using an interdisciplinary methodology drawn from cinema studies and music theory. She traces the emergence of this Black aesthetic from its origin in the Black Power movement's emphasis on the creation of visual icons and the Black Arts movement's celebration of urban vernacular culture.

Placing environmental literature in the life sciences, Love argues that literary studies has been diminshed by a lack of recognition for the role that the biological foundation of human life plays in cultural imagination. He presents a model incorporating Darwinian ideas into ecocritical thinking.

This work presents links between the myth of Caribbean Paradise and colonial ideologies and economics. It considers the cultural, economic and social effects of tourism's contemporary Caribbean and explores the way post colonial writers have responded to the paradise-plantation dichotomy.

Representations of Joan of Arc have been used in the United States for the past two hundred years, appearing in advertising, cartoons, popular song, art, criticism, and propaganda. The presence of the fifteenth-century French heroine in the cinema is particularly intriguing in relation to the role of women during wartime. Robin Blaetz argues that a mythic Joan of Arc was used during the First World War to cast a medieval glow over an unpopular war, but that she only appeared after the Second World War to encourage women to abandon their wartime jobs and return to the home.In Visions of the Maid, Blaetz examines three pivotal films-Cecil B. DeMille's 1916 Joan the Woman, Victor Fleming's 1948 Joan of Arc, and Otto Preminger's 1957 Saint Joan-as well as addressing a broad array of popular culture references and every other film about the heroine made or distributed in the United States. Blaetz is particularly concerned with issues of gender and the ways in which Joan of Arc's androgyny, virginity, and sacrificial victimhood were evoked in relation to the evolving roles of women during war throughout the twentieth century.

An exploration of the often conflicted relationship between the United Democratic Front's large-scale resistance to apartheid and its everyday struggles at the local level. Interviews with Cachalia and other personalities in the UDF examine the organization's workings.

The work focuses on the life of a horse wrangler named Chonrad Stoeckhlin (1549-1587), whose extraordinary visions of the afterlife and enthusiastic practice of the occult eventually led to his death - and to the death of a number of village women - for crimes of witchcraft.

In the nineteenth century, a woman who could prove a man had broken his promise to marry her was legally entitled to compensation for damages. Bridging the gap between history and literature, Ginger Frost offers an in-depth examination of these breaches of promise and compares actual with fictional cases.

This text is both a biography of Ethan Allen and a social history of the conflict between agrarian commoners and their wealthy adversaries.

Since the 1950s, David Apter and Carl Rosberg have been among the leading American scholars in African studies. In this volume they, along with other specialists in the field, explore the new configurations of African politics.

This work on the religious thought of Thomas Jefferson grew out of a study of Jefferson's reading interests, particularly in religious and ethical subjects as reflected in his library holdings and literary comments.