Books published by University Press of Florida

Builds on the work of previous scholars who have identified the ways that black women's narratives often contain a form of spirituality rooted in African cosmology, which consistently grounds their characters' self-empowerment and quest for autonomy.

Case studies from Alofi, Vanuatu, the Marianas, Hawai`i, Guam, and Taiwan compare the development of colonialism across different islands. Contributors discuss human settlement before the arrival of Dutch, French, British, and Spanish explorers, tracing major exchange routes that were active as early as the tenth century.

Any observer of Dominican political and literary discourse will quickly notice how certain notions of hyper-masculinity permeate the culture. Many critics will attribute this to an outgrowth of "e;traditional"e; Latin American patriarchal culture. Masculinity after Trujillo demonstrates why they are mistaken.In this extraordinary work, Maja Horn argues that this common Dominican attitude became ingrained during the dictatorship (1930-61) of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, as well as through the U.S. military occupation that preceded it. Where previous studies have focused mainly on Spanish colonialism and the controversial sharing of the island with Haiti, Horn emphasizes the underexamined and lasting influence of U.S. imperialism and how it prepared the terrain for Trujillo's hyperbolic language of masculinity. She also demonstrates how later attempts to emasculate the image of Trujillo often reproduced the same masculinist ideology popularized by his government.By using the lens of gender politics, Horn enables readers to reconsider the ongoing legacy of the Trujillato, including the relatively weak social movements formed around racial and ethnic identities, sexuality, and even labor. She offers exciting new interpretations of such writers as Hilma Contreras, Rita Indiana Hernandez, and Junot Diaz, revealing the ways they successfully challenge dominant political and canonical literary discourses.

One of the country's most respected newspapers developed in tandem with the sometimes paradoxical life of Nelson Poynter, its owner for three decades until his death in 1978. The St. Petersburg Times, once an unremarkable daily read mainly by the residents of Pinellas County, Florida, gained (as a result of Poynter's obsessive demands) an international reputation for journalistic innovation and quality. Poynter believed that a newspaper is a sacred trust. He set a national standard by using color graphics and photos to tell complex stories. He was one of the first to launch a crusade for good writing, and he refused to kowtow to community opinion. "In Florida's largest bastion of Republicanism, it kept intact its reputation as the state's most liberal editorial voice," Pierce writes. "It exhorted its readers to change their minds on gun control, Contra aid, and capital punishment." The Times gave its readers what it thought was good for them, whether they liked it or not. Equally paradoxical was Poynter's legacy. His will set in motion a unique experiment in U.S. journalism management that made public service, not money-making, the moving force and primary responsibility of a news medium. This procedure left ownership of the paper to an educational institute, but gave total control to a series of chief executives, each of whom would choose a successor. Any corporate history is a suspicious undertaking, and the author writes in the preface that he was wary at the outset, recognizing that "the Times's extraordinary story had taken on mythical dimensions as told by true believers among its executives." The book is nevertheless as objective as biography can be. The author has interwoven Poynter's life and death not only with the tempestuous and highly relevant history of his own family but also with the major themes in the newspaper's evolution, and he locates all of these in the context of national and state history and of journalistic development. In the end, though, it is "a story of human beings, some brilliant, some obsessed, all with limitations, [who] somehow . . . worked together to fashion a newspaper unlike any other."

Confronting Godfrey Hodgson's long-standing theory that a ""liberal consensus"" shaped the United States after World War II, this volume finds that although elite politicians from both parties did share certain principles that gave direction to postwar America, the nation still experienced major political, cultural, and ideological conflict during this time.

Updates the successful guide to North American mosquitoes published by the American Mosquito Control Association in 1981. It includes 12 new species that have since been added to the North American mosquito fauna, revised distribution maps of all species, and revised and completely illustrated identification keys.

Presents, in a single volume, key seminal essays in the study of James Joyce. Representing important contributions to scholarship that have helped shape current methods of approaching Joyce's works, the volume reacquaints contemporary readers with the literature that forms the basis of ongoing scholarly inquiries in the field.

Assuming the position of the ideal contemporary Irish reader that Joyce might have anticipated, this work argues that the main character, James Duffy, is a "spoiled priest," emotionally arrested by his guilt at having rejected the call to the priesthood. Duffy's intellectual life thereafter progresses through German idealism to eventual nihilism.

Science writer Willy Ley inspired Americans of all ages to imagine a future of interplanetary travel long before space shuttles existed. This is the first biography of an important public figure who predicted and boosted the rise of the Space Age, yet has been overlooked in the history of science.

From his World War I service in Italy through his transformational return visits during the decades that followed, Ernest Hemingway's Italian experiences were fundamental to his artistic development. Hemingway and Italy offers essays from top scholars, exciting new voices, and people who knew Hemingway during his Italian days, examining how his adopted homeland shaped his writing and his legacy.

The ancient Maya invested prodigious amounts of labour in the construction of road systems for communication and trade, yet recent discoveries surrounding Chetumal Bay reveal an extensive network of riverine and maritime waterways. Focusing on sites ringing the bay such as Cerro Maya, Oxtankah, and Santa Rita Corozal, this volume explores how the bay and its feeder rivers affected all aspects of Maya culture.

Combining archival research and oral history, Bush examines Virginia Key Beach as a window into local activism and forms of black-white dialogue in multicultural Miami from 1915 to 2012.

In this second volume of her acclaimed study of Virginia Woolf's multivolume diary, Barbara Lounsberry traces the English writer's life through the thirteen diaries she kept from 1918 to 1929. Lounsberry shows how Woolf's writing at this time was influenced by other diarists and how she continued to use her diaries as a way to experiment with form and her evolving modernist style.