Books published by University of Virginia Press

Earth Repair: A Transatlantic History of Environmental Restoration travels between the US and Italy to see that restoration has taken many forms over the past two hundred years, from repairing to gardening. The book clarifies meanings of restoration and shows how these have changed through time and place.

Taking its cue from Perry Miller's 1956 classic of American literary criticism, The Raven and the Whale, Caroline Chamberlin Hellman examines ways in which contemporary multi-ethnic American writers of the United States have responded to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts historically central to the American literary canon.

Opens a window into Spanish-Language writing produced by Spanish American exiles, travellers, and immigrants who settled and passed through Philadelphia during the early nineteenth century, when the city's printing presses offered a vehicle for the voices advocating independence in the shadow of Spanish colonialism.

From Zora Neale Hurston to Derek Walcott to Toni Morrison, New World black authors have written about African-derived religious traditions and spiritual practices. The Sacred Act of Reading examines religion and sociopolitical power in modern and contemporary texts of a variety of genres from the black Americas.

In this powerful memoir, Charles Dew, one of America's most respected historians of the South--and particularly its history of slavery--turns the focus on his own life, which began not in the halls of enlightenment but in a society unequivocally committed to segregation. Dew re-creates the midcentury American South of his childhood--in many respects a boy's paradise, but one stained by Lost Cause revisionism and, worse, by the full brunt of Jim Crow. Through entertainments and "e;educational"e; books that belittled African Americans, as well as the living examples of his own family, Dew was indoctrinated in a white supremacy that, at best, was condescendingly paternalistic and, at worst, brutally intolerant. The fear that southern culture, and the "e;hallowed white male brotherhood,"e; could come undone through the slightest flexibility in the color line gave the Jim Crow mindset its distinctly unyielding quality. Dew recalls his father, in most regards a decent man, becoming livid over a black tradesman daring to use the front, and not the back, door.The second half of the book shows how this former Confederate youth and descendant of Thomas Roderick Dew, one of slavery's most passionate apologists, went on to reject his racist upbringing and become a scholar of the South and its deeply conflicted history. The centerpiece of Dew's story is his sobering discovery of a price circular from 1860--an itemized list of humans up for sale. Contemplating this document becomes Dew's first step in an exploration of antebellum Richmond's slave trade that investigates the terrible--but, to its white participants, unremarkable--inhumanity inherent in the institution.Dew's wish with this book is to show how the South of his childhood came into being, poisoning the minds even of honorable people, and to answer the question put to him by Illinois Browning Culver, the African American woman who devoted decades of her life to serving his family: "e;Charles, why do the grown-ups put so much hate in the children?"e;

How should we respond to the moral and ethical challenges of our times? What are our individual and collective responsibilities in advancing the principles of democracy and justice? Charlottesville 2017 brings together the work of UVA faculty members to examine their community's history more deeply and more broadly.

Offers a comprehensive analysis of Edwidge Danticat's exploration of the dialogic relationship between nation and diaspora. NadTHge T. Clitandre argues that Danticat - moving between novels, short stories, and essays - articulates a diasporic consciousness that acts as a social, political, and cultural transformation at the local and global level.

Argues that the fear of infected books energized aesthetic and political debates about the power of reading, which could alter individual and social bodies by connecting people of all sorts in dangerous ways through print.