Books published by University of Virginia Press

"Albright contends that Tennyson's "aesthetic goals were... in conflict" and that his poetry attempts to "unite two incompatible poetics',' one governed by a heavenly muse, the other by an earthly muse suspicious of the idealizations and abstractions held dear by the first. The result is a poetry of "myopia and astigmatism".

Examines and compares the three races who lived in Virginia during the seventeenth century. Each is described according to its origin and cultural background, its population in America, its settlement locations, and its relations with the other two races. Extensive notes amply document the author's conclusions and provide a helpful summary of other scholarship on the subject.

By tracing the connections between marginal apparatus, authority, and authorship, Tribble suggests that changes in book production had consequences for the changing relations among readers, writers, and cultural authority in the early modern period.

Blending social, intellectual, legal, medical, gender, and cultural history, Segregation's Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia examines how eugenic theory and practice bolstered Virginia's various cultures of segregation--rich from poor, sick from well, able from disabled, male from female, and black from white and Native American. Famously articulated by Thomas Jefferson, ideas about biological inequalities among groups evolved throughout the nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century, proponents of eugenics--the "e;science"e; of racial improvement--melded evolutionary biology and incipient genetics with long-standing cultural racism. The resulting theories, taught to generations of Virginia high school, college, and medical students, became social policy as Virginia legislators passed eugenic marriage and sterilization statutes. The enforcement of these laws victimized men and women labeled "e;feebleminded,"e; African Americans, and Native Americans for over forty years.However, this is much more than the story of majority agents dominating minority subjects. Although white elites were the first to champion eugenics, by the 1910s African American Virginians were advancing their own hereditarian ideas, creating an effective counter-narrative to white scientific racism. Ultimately, segregation's science contained the seeds of biological determinism's undoing, realized through the civil, women's, Native American, and welfare rights movements. Of interest to historians, educators, biologists, physicians, and social workers, this study reminds readers that science is socially constructed; the syllogism "e;Science is objective; objective things are moral; therefore science is moral"e; remains as potentially dangerous and misleading today as it was in the past.

Young Continental soldiers carried a heavy burden in the American Revolution. Their experiences of coming of age during the upheavals of war provide a novel perspective on the Revolutionary era, eliciting questions of gender, family life, economic goals, and politics. "e;Going for a soldier"e; forced young men to confront profound uncertainty, and even coercion, but also offered them novel opportunities. Although the war imposed obligations on youths, military service promised young men in their teens and early twenties alternate paths forward in life. Continental soldiers' own youthful expectations about respectable manhood and their goals of economic competence and marriage not only ordered their experience of military service; they also shaped the fighting capacities of George Washington's army and the course of the war. Becoming Men of Some Consequence examines how young soldiers and officers joined the army, their experiences in the ranks, their relationships with civilians, their choices about quitting long-term military service, and their attempts to rejoin the flow of civilian life after the war. The book recovers young soldiers' perspectives and stories from military records, wartime letters and journals, and postwar memoirs and pension applications, revealing how revolutionary political ideology intertwined with rational calculations and youthful ambitions. Its focus on soldiers as young men offers a new understanding of the Revolutionary War, showing how these soldiers' generational struggle for their own independence was a profound force within America's struggle for its independence.

The first novel available to English readers by Fawzia Zouari, one of the most important North African authors writing today, begins with an emergency crew's arrival at a Parisian apartment. Two emaciated young women, sisters, are brought out on stretchers. To the crowd of onlookers the women's condition is mystifying; for the two sisters, this is the inescapable end to a tragic series of events.Inspired by an actual news story from the French headlines, I Die by This Country introduces us to Nacera and Amira. Casting her mind back in the midst of the opening pages' upheaval, Nacera pieces together her fragmentary knowledge of her parents' lives in rural French Algeria and their immigration to Paris in the years following Algeria's war for independence. Her memories of how both she and Amira struggled to find their place as children of immigrants reveals the enormous stress of social exclusion and identity conflicts facing immigrant youth. Nacera and her family yearn for acceptance, but the reader sees this dream becoming increasingly unattainable.Zouari's frank prose and penetrating storytelling deftly relates the multigenerational experience of Franco-Algerian immigration during the last quarter of the twentieth century. As France continues, like so many western countries, to struggle with questions regarding national identity, immigration, and its colonial past, the experiences depicted in this novel resonate more than ever.

A study of the much debated problem of Soren Kierkegaard's "indirect communication". It approaches the problem in a new way by applying some of the insights of recent literary theory. This study is both a contribution to literary theory, in the sense that it seeks to apply it, and a suggestion for renewal within phenomenological philosophy.

The history of African Americans in southern Appalachia after the Civil War has largely escaped the attention of scholars of both African Americans and the region. In Facing Freedom, Daniel Thorp relates the complex experience of an African American community in southern Appalachia as it negotiated a radically new world in the four decades following the Civil War.

A scholarly and imaginative reconstruction of the voyage Daniel Defoe took from the pillory to literary immortality, The Shortest Way with Defoe contends that Robinson Crusoe contains a secret satire, written against one person, that has gone undetected for 300 years.

Uncovering the more prurient aspects of nation-building, Erotic Citizens establishes the narrative of sexual ruin as a genre whose sustained rejection of marriage acted as a critique of that which traditionally defines a democracy: the social contract and the sovereign individual.

The first essay collection to consider the Caribbean's relationship to Jewishness through a literary lens. Although Caribbean novelists and poets regularly incorporate Jewish motifs in their work, scholars have neglected this strain in studies of Caribbean literature.

The debut publication in a new series devoted to the body as an object of historical study, Sight Correction provides an expansive analysis of blindness in eighteenth-century Britain, developing a new methodology for conceptualizing sight impairment.

The first essay collection to consider the Caribbean's relationship to Jewishness through a literary lens. Although Caribbean novelists and poets regularly incorporate Jewish motifs in their work, scholars have neglected this strain in studies of Caribbean literature.

Offers a cultural history that traces syphilis and its consequences in the transatlantic Spanish-speaking world throughout the long eighteenth century. Juan Carlos Gonzalez Espitia explores how fears of the disease and the search for its cure mobilized a transoceanic dialogue that forms an underside of Enlightenment narratives of progress.

As news of revolutionary human-to-human blood transfusion spread from professional publications to popular journals and newspapers, the operation invaded the Victorian imagination. Transfusion is the first extended study of this intersection between medical and literary history.

Considers how certain literary texts confront the dominant and, at times, exaggerated anti-Haitian Dominican ideology. Megan Jeanette Myers examines the antagonistic portrayal of the two nations, endeavouring to reposition Haiti on the literary map of the Dominican Republic and beyond.