In “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” Robin enters Boston after negotiating the cost of a ferry ride across the Charles River, a negotiation complicated by the precipitous depreciation of the provincial bill he carries. His night in Boston therefore unfolds under the volatile sign of paper money. The story is one of several Hawthorne works to join the paper-gold debate of the nineteenth century, and it historicizes that debate with persistent allusions to related eighteenth-century currency disputes. The story's famous ambivalence springs in part from Hawthorne's cognizance of a historical irony: in the nineteenth century, Jacksonian Democrats attacked paper money as the instrument of a neoaristocratic moneyed power; in the eighteenth century, royalists stigmatized it as the instrument of the “Popular or Democratick Part of the Constitution.” The story is informed by the discomfiting fact that the eighteenth-century Tory and the nineteenth-century Democrat equally privileged gold over paper.

In his presidential address at the 1970 MLA convention, Maynard Mack sounded a warning bell concerning activism and the future of literary studies. Faced with a seemingly endless conflict in Vietnam and a national student body growing polarized in its response to this war, higher education, including language-based pedagogy, was in crisis. Of particular concern to Mack was a growing generational disconnect over the role of activism in the literature classroom. He cited a landmark study in which nearly two-thirds of all professors over the age of thirty maintained that any foray into politics should be avoided, if not altogether prohibited, in formal course work. The younger generation disagreed: two-thirds of them, in fact, felt a moral and pedagogical obligation to use colleges and universities as loci for social change. This ideological divide, Mack predicted, would soon create “a crisis of authority in the offing beside which all current manifestations would look pale” (365).

In advocating a biocultural approach to literature, one is claiming an ineluctable relation between science and culture. Biology, for example, is as intrinsic to the embodied state of readers and writers as history and culture are intrinsic to the professional bodies of knowledge known as science and biology. To think of science without including a historical and cultural analysis would be like thinking of the literary text without the surrounding weave of active or dormant discursive knowledges. It is similarly limited to think of literature—or to debate its properties or existence—without considering the network of meanings we might learn from a scientific perspective. Combined, these propositions link with a more synthetic argument: that the biological without the cultural, or the cultural without the biological, is doomed to be reductionist at best and inaccurate at worst.

There is a hint of Minerva's owl in medieval philosophy's relation to the apparently mundane formal question of analogy. The problem is everywhere in scholastic thought, inherited from Aristotle and Averroës, then adapted as one of the basic formal mechanisms through which Thomistic logic both transposes its own theological categories onto an older classical framework and apprehends metaphysical relations of being, of identity and difference. Classically, it is by analogy that one conceives the likeness of the unlike, extracting a concept from the individual instances and scattered genera in which it otherwise resides: the quality of wisdom that characterizes God, say, but might differently characterize humans; the property of animation that attaches to humans but differently qualifies beasts. Hegel notes this problem of scholastic analogy in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, when he comments of Aquinas that the category of “substance (forma substantialis) is, for instance, analogous to” Aristotle's notion of entelechy (3: 71) or when he dismisses medieval Latin more generally as “a quite unsuitable instrument” for the consideration of older philosophical forms—in effect, an imprecise exercise in analogy (38).

This article underscores the need to reconstruct Mexican American literary historiography by locating and analyzing pre–Chicano/a movement critical sources. Consideration of how Mexican Americans saw their literature at different junctures in the past will ensure that we do not impose our own aesthetic and political criteria as we reinterpret older texts. I analyze a 1959 literary history of New Mexico and Colorado in order to explore how a recovery of this particular text would intervene in current debates in the field of Chicana/o studies, most prominently the tension between nationalism and regional studies, on the one hand, and transnationalism, on the other. My analysis demonstrates that Mexican Americans and Chicanos/as have shared literary tastes and cultural capital with other Latinas/os and Latin Americans and that consequently Chicano/a literary history should be a discipline that goes beyond borders.

American literary studies has shown that the symbolic exclusion of Native Americans from the Puritan and early national imaginaries was an essential component of the making of an American identity. This argument builds on reading practices that stress literary-historical contextualization. Our essay considers how M. Night Shyamalan's film The Village (2004) addresses the continuing relevance of Native American exclusion from the national imaginary not by faithfully representing “history” but by layering its narrative with multiple historical registers. Realized through editing, cinematography, and set design, these registers—seventeenth-century Puritan, turn-of-the-twentieth-century utopian, and “the present”—are stage-managed by a group of idealistic elders who wish to protect their community from the evils of the world outside. While most critics have reduced The Village to an allegory of post-9/11 United States political culture, we propose a viewing of the film as parable that marks historical collapses and exclusions as the limits of utopia.

Although the nature poems of the Jamaican writer Una Marson are usually set against her transnational projects, they are inextricable from the cosmopolitan vision described in her radio broadcasts and journalism. Studies of transnational modernism have brought to the fore Marson's participation in pan- Africanist political and literary networks, her poems' mediation of the black West Indian woman's experience, and her work promoting West Indian literature in the metropolitan institution of the BBC. Analyses of Marson as a transnational igure, however, have obscured aspects of her literary production—speciically, her nature poetry. Placing Marson's West Indian nature poetry that was broadcast by the BBC in the context of the original programs reveals the efects of moving from print publication to radio broadcast. And, along with her editorials for the Jamaican literary magazine The Cosmopolitan (1928–31), Marson's BBC broadcasts (1939–45) make the case for the ongoing relevance of the pastoral tradition to public life.

The world's great cities have long been a focal point for artists, writers, poets, and social commentators, who have sought to use them both as backdrop or canvas for their work and as the subject matter of commentary and critique about the condition of society. Some have cast cities as places of nightmares and dystopian visions and landscapes. The French writer Octave Mir-beau evokes this genre when he notes that the dirt and smog of nineteenth-century London are part of “a dream, of mystery … of chaos,” what he refers to as the “special nature of the prodigious city” (qtd. in Ackroyd 773). Others, such as the Romantic poets, described the city as antinaturalistic, a place of nature's expulsion. Here urban dirt and pollution were metaphors for the degradation of human spirit and character; the English novelist George Gissing, for instance, characterized the smells in the district of Southwark in London as rising like “a miasma that caught the breath.”

The Cuban Revolution Generated a New Communist Paranoia in the United States. Interest in Latin America Grew Dramatically after Castro's rise to power in 1959 and was partly responsible for the explosive growth in the number of scholars specializing in hemispheric issues during the 1960s. Latin Americans, in turn, saw this phase of the Cold War as a furthering of imperial aggression by the United States. The Eisenhower administration's authoritarian diplomatic maneuvers to isolate Guatemala by accusing the country's democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz (1950-54), of being a communist and by pressuring members of the Organization of American States to do likewise had already alarmed intellectuals and artists in Latin America five years before. On 17 June 1954, Carlos Castillo Armas and a band of a few hundred mercenaries invaded the country from Honduras with logistical support from the Central Intelligence Agency in an operation code-named PBSUCCESS, authorized by President Eisenhower in August 1953. By 1 July 1954 the so-called Movement of National Liberation had taken over Guatemala. Angela Fillingim's research evidences how the United States officially viewed Guatemala as “Pre-Western,” according to “pre-established criteria,” because the Latin American country had failed to eliminate its indigenous population (5-6). Implicitly, the model was that of the nineteenth-century American West. As a solution, the State Department proposed “finishing the Conquest.”

The United States looms large in the Latin American literary imagination. From Domingo Sarmiento and José Martí in the nineteenth century to Octavio Paz and Alberto Fuguet in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, many Latin American writers have depicted the United States in their writings and pondered the cultural and historical significance of their powerful neighbor to the north. But perhaps no Latin American writer has had as close—and complicated—a relationship with the United States as Carlos Fuentes. Fuentes was a fierce critic of American culture and United States foreign policy; at the same time, there was much that he admired about the United States, and it was clear that he was eager to have his voice heard here.

A rendition by nayif kharma of michael etherton's theatrical adaptation of john reed's english translation, the arabic version of Ferdinand Oyono's novel Une vie de boy is at three removes from the original French. Under the title Al-khādim (“The Servant”), the play appeared in 1982 in the series Min al-masrah al-'ālami (“From World Theater”), published by Kuwait's Ministry of Culture. Since to all effects and purposes Etherton's theatrical adaptation is Kharma's original, it is necessary to begin by describing how the Zambian-born British writer who taught drama at the University of Zambia in the 1960s adapted his source, Reed's Houseboy, before discussing how the play was later Arabized.

This essay endeavors to clarify the paradoxes of Jamaica Kincaid's grief in her AIDS memoir, My Brother (1997). By analyzing two related motifs—the memoir's pattern of botanical metaphors and the descriptions of her brother Devon's dying and of his corpse—the essay explores how Kincaid's melancholic commitment to Devon complicates her approach to biographical and autobiographical writing. Weighed down and consumed by her brother's affliction, Kincaid traces how Devon—or, rather, her memory of him—possesses independent powers of articulation, forcing her to confront her own implication, as a relatively privileged expatriate writer, in the political, social, and economic contexts that shape his suffering. A self-theorizing text that testifies to the changing demographics of the AIDS pandemic, My Brother also overlaps with and significantly redirects current theoretical understandings of mourning and melancholia, through its relocation of melancholic subjectivity at the intersection of postcolonial and racial anxieties.

Manuel GonzÁlez prada (1844-1918), like inca garcilaso de la vega, César vallejo, josé marÍa arguedas, and mario vargas llosa, ranks among the top Peruvian literary figures, but only in Peru, where his work is hotly debated by literati, social scientists, historians, politicians, and journalists. Outside Peru he rates no more than the inclusion in anthologies of one of his poems; his most famous essay, “Nuestros indios” (“Our Indians”); or the occasional critical article on his work. However, with the Cuban José Martí (1853-95), González Prada is a founder of Latin American modernism, a movement that critics generally accept as running roughly from the publication of Rubén Darío's Azul, in 1888, to Darío's death, in 1916. Gordon Brotherston notes that Darío coined the term modernismo the same year he published Azul (vii). There are many reasons there has been less interest in González Prada than in Martí and other modernists. To begin with, Darío, in an 1888 visit to Peru, met with Ricardo Palma but not González Prada (Castro). Palma, writing in a more traditional style—even though he invented a genre, tradiciones—was the establishment's literary darling, while González Prada, always the innovator in style and an agitator in subject matter, remained largely unknown outside his native land. Thus, it made perfect sense that the maker of literary movements would visit the internationally known Palma but not González Prada, who could not add to his fame and expanding literary networks. Furthermore, when Darío later went to New York he turned his epistolary relationship with Martí into a personal friendship (Henríquez Ureña 93). In the United States there is much more interest in Martí, who lived here, than in González Prada, who did not. Hispanic modernism is typically understood to include the like-minded people whom Darío knew personally, such as Martí, Julián del Casal (Cuba), Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera (Mexico), Ricardo Jaimes Freyre (Bolivia), and Juan Ramón Jiménez (Spain), and to exclude those whom he did not, such as Adela Zamudio (Bolivia) and González Prada. Finally, González Prada's anarchism, his feminism, and his tell-it-like-it-is essays did not endear him to many people.