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This study of atheist African American writers poses a substantive challenge to those who see atheism in despairing and nihilistic terms. The author argues that while most white atheists mourn the loss of faith, many black atheists — believing the “God-concept” spawns racism and oppression — consider the death of God a cause for personal and political hope. Focusing on a little-discussed aspect of African American literature, this analysis of African American atheists' treatment of God fills a huge gap in studies that consistently ignore their contributions. Examining how a belief in God and His “chosen people” necessitates a politics of superiority and inferiority, the author considers the degree to which religious faith is responsible for justifying oppression, even acts of physical and psychological violence. In their secular vision of social and political justice, black atheists argue that only when the culture adopts and internalizes a truly atheist politics — one based on pluralism, tolerance, and freedom — will radical democracy be achieved.

Toni Morrison herself has long urged for organic critical readings of her works. This book delves into African spiritual traditions, explaining the meanings of African cosmology and epistemology as manifest in Morrison's novels. The result is a critical investigation of such works as The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Paradise, Love, Beloved, and Jazz. While others have studied the African spiritual ideas and values encoded in Morrison's work, the author of this study explores a wide range of complex concepts, including African deities, ancestral ideas, spiritual archetypes, mythic trope, and lyrical prose representing African spiritual continuities. She writes this book, not only as a literary critic but also as a practicing Obatala priest in the Yoruba spiritual tradition and a Mama Nganga in the Kongo spiritual system. She analyzes tensions between communal and individual values and moral codes as represented in Morrison's novels. She also uses interviews with and non-fiction written by Morrison to further build her critical paradigm.

At Fault: James Joyce and the Crisis of the Modern University argues that American universities have lost their way and that the works of James Joyce will put them back on the scent. In American university education today, an excess of caution has led to a serious error in our education system. To be “at fault” is to have lost one’s path: the university’s current crisis in confidence can be addressed by attending to the lessons that Joyce teaches us. Joyce models risk-taking in all three areas of the academic enterprise: research, teaching, and service. His texts go out of bounds, resisting the end, pushing beyond themselves. Joyce writes in an outlaw language, and the acknowledgment of failure is written into every right action. At stake is the enterprise of humanism: without an appreciation of error, and an understanding of infinite possibility, the university will calcify and lose its right to lead the nations of the world. The book draws upon the author’s thirty years of teaching experience to demonstrate what works in the classroom when teaching Joyce and makes a powerful contribution to debates on interdisciplinarity and university teaching. There are chapters on centrifugal motion, gramophones, elephants, fox-hunting, philately, brain mapping, and baseball: a compendium of approaches befitting the ever-expanding world of James Joyce.

Becoming Virginia Woolf is the first extensive treatment of Woolf’s early diaries. Her first 12 diary books are explored in depth and her development as a diarist traced. The book offers close readings of each of the 12 diaries: (1) as a work of art in itself; (2) as it relates to Woolf’s other early diaries; and (3) as it intersects with her public works (letters and published essays, reviews, fiction, and nonfiction.) This method lays bare, not only Woolf’s development as a diarist, but also—an extra dividend—as a public writer. It shows how she becomes the writer so widely revered today. Becoming Virginia Woolf offers a new approach to Woolf biography as well: her life as she marked it in her diary from age 14 to 36. New, too, is the importance of other diaries to Woolf’s creative life. As Woolf’s first two decades as a diarist unfold, interwoven as she read them are 15 key diaries that helped shape both her semi-private diary and her public prose.

“After the Race” registers James Joyce's personal anxieties and rivalries on the verge of his emigration from Dublin. In the figure of Villona, the detached and gifted musician, Joyce sketches his first self-portrait, heralding the dawn of his own literary career as “the poet of my nation.” The story reflects the radical nationalist perception articulated by Arthur Griffith that the staging the Gordon Bennett Cup Race and King Edward VII's visit in July 1903 were both designed to upstage the centennial celebration of Robert Emmet's rebellion. The story allegorizes these Anglo-Irish tensions within the Great Game of global politics. The technique of the story—its design, use of free indirect discourse, multivalent language, significant silences, and cunning allusions—assimilates elements from its author's rhetorical education and invokes precedents from Ovid, Villon, Dumas, Dolmetsch, and the Irish oral tradition. The story therefore documents Joyce's multiple affinities with the mainstream of European literature and with the popular movement to revive native cultural practices. On the moral and philosophical planes, the story invokes the Pauline criticism of pagan materialism while brilliantly parodying the vacuous calculations of Theosophy. This apprentice exercise exhibits many of Joyce's permanent themes and is demonstrably a sophisticated political and philosophic work written in the shadow of Dante's Divine Comedy.

Behind the Masks of Modernism: Global and Transnational Perspectives is an anthology that studies global modernisms through the lens of masks. The manuscript explores regional, national and transnational modernisms as they are represented through literature, art, history, architecture, drama, and cultural studies. We are invested in recent studies of global modernisms and the “transnational turn” which de-centers modernism from its Western origins. In dialogue with other recent works on global modernisms such as Mark Wollaeger’s anthology, The Oxford Handbook to Global Modernisms, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel’s Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity, Dilip Gaonkar’s Alternative Modernities, and Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large, our text uses the common trope of masks as a comparative scaffolding that explores how artists and writers produced their works in moments of emerging modernity, aesthetic sensibility, and deep societal transformation. From masking as a method of sustaining tradition in the midst of new technological advances, to the motif of theatre masks as representing one’s entry into modernity, to the masking of one’s relationship to authoritative national influences revolutionizing cultural education, our analyses of masks uncovers the dialogical nature of regional modernisms and highlights key differences that stem from local cultural spheres within a unified, cross-cultural discussion about a topic of interest across these differences.

This book offers a new perspective on one of the most puzzling questions faced by Shaw scholars—how to reconcile the artist's individualist leanings with his socialist Fabian ideals. The book does this by viewing Shaw as a maverick whose approach was impossible to duplicate and grew out of his unique artistic temperament, his outlook, and his vocation. Shaw's activities in promoting the Fabians' goals of advancing social democracy were highly distinctive. He effectively used calculated irritation as an attention-getting tactic; he relied on devices that he had formulated as a creative rhetorician, rather than on the academic principles that were second nature to most of his fellow Fabians; and he devised and championed the use of indirect means to “persuade the world to take our ideas into account in reforming itself.”

Bringing far-removed time periods into startling conversation, this book argues that certain attitudes and practices present in Europe's Middle Ages were foundational in the development of the western concept of race. As early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, society was already preoccupied with skin color. Using historical, literary, and artistic sources, the book explores the multitude of ways the coding of black as “evil” and white as “good” existed in medieval European societies.

Black Well-Being analyzes conflicting, oftentimes messy, articulations of black selfhood. From the classical healthy mind-in-body ideal to the disabled physique, the portrayals of black physicality in the literature analyzed here offer a striking range of strategic approaches to creating a nineteenth-century politics of well-being opposed to as well as independent of medically and legally informed systems of subjugation. These authors’ wide-ranging analyses of black well-being expose the instability of national and colonial, social and geopolitical constructs and the mythologies that support them, such as, for example, American exceptionalism, the civilizing enterprise of imperial Britain, and colonial Canada’s role as a safe haven from American slavery and racism. Their considerations of well-being, a fundamental, desirable aspect of selfhood, demonstrate the broad and complex scope of their early-to-mid-nineteenth-century black political philosophy. Their varied articulations bolster the need for an urgent reassessment of our twenty-first-century approaches to biopolitics, health, law, literature, personhood, and humanness toward the development of theories and models of ethical practice that truly account for the contextually discursive composition of the self.

June 16, 2004, was the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, the day that James Joyce's novel Ulysses takes place. To celebrate the occasion, thousands took to the streets in Dublin, following in the footsteps of protagonist Leopold Bloom. The event also was marked by the Bloomsday 100 Symposium, where world-renowned scholars discussed Joyce's seminal work. This volume contains readings of Ulysses presented at the conference. The contributors to this volume urge a close engagement with the novel. They offer readings that focus variously on the materialist, historical, and political dimensions of Ulysses. The diversity of topics covered include nineteenth-century psychology, military history, Catholic theology, the influence of early film and music hall songs on Joyce, the post-Ulysses evolution of the one-day novel, and the challenge of discussing such a complex work amongst the sea of extant criticism.

The Old French fabliaux are humorous short stories from the 13th century that resemble some of the most memorable tales in Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron (1348-1351). Yet their humor and ostensible frivolity conceal a serious challenge to didactic literature. A century later, Boccaccio used these types of tales to promote the openness of literary interpretation as a choice for the reader. This study shows that the fabliaux had a greater influence on the Decameron than has previously been recognized. Boccaccio took from the fabliaux the use of reversal as a technique for manipulating narrative structure; in addition, the manuscripts in which the fabliaux were transmitted served as models for the organization of the Decameron. The use of reversal in both the fabliaux and the Decameron underscores a paradigm shift in medieval thinking away from purely didactic literature toward a literature of enjoyment. Reversal in the fabliaux brings together linguistic and thematic opposites and interchanges them in order to show that these opposites offer equally valid positions from which the stories can be interpreted. Reversal also allows the fabliaux to adapt to a variety of contemporaneous genres while still maintaining their fundamental character. The fabliaux's use of reversal disrupts the moral didacticism preserved with the texts in manuscript anthologies. As Boccaccio standardized the medieval short story in the Decameron, he drew from both the fabliaux tradition and from the manuscript anthologies in which they were transmitted in order to conjoin diverse genres and provoke a multiplicity of interpretations.

This book, written partly in the Cherokee syllabary by a Cherokee critic, argues that William Bradford's Of Plimoth Plantation shows evidence of American Indian poetics. It is a revisioning of the genesis of American literary history. The book reveals that, from its earliest moments, American literature has owed its distinctive shape to the determining influence of American Indian thought and culture. It demonstrates the extent of this influence by identifying the scores of Native historical, biographical, and ceremonial texts, as well as vocabularies, compositional principles, and rhetorical strategies, embedded in Bradford's history. The book emphasizes that American literature did not begin with European-American colonial writings, but rather in the oral traditions and ceremonial rituals of America's five hundred indigenous Nations. The verbal power of these ancient oralities invaded the newly forming American letters.

This volume explores how recent Brazilian lyric engages with its counterparts throughout the Western Hemisphere in an increasingly globalized world. The study focuses on the years from 1985 to the present and examines poetic output—from song and visual poetry to discursive verse—across a range of media. At the core of the author's work are in-depth examinations of five phenomena: the use of the English language and the reception of American poetry in Brazil; representations and engagements with U.S. culture, especially with respect to film and popular music; epic poems of hemispheric solidarity; contemporary dialogues between Brazilian and Spanish American poets; and the innovative musical, lyrical, and commercially successful work that evolved from the 1960s movement Tropicalia.

African identities have been written and rewritten about in both British and African literature for decades. These revisions have opened up new formulations of what it really means to be British or African. By comparing texts by authors from African and British backgrounds across a wide variety of political orientations, the book analyzes the deeper relationships between colonizer and colonized. It brings issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality into the analysis, providing new ways for cultural scholars to think about how empire and colony have impacted one another from the late eighteenth century through the decades following World War II. In these comparisons, the book focuses on commonalities rather than differences. By examining the work of writers including Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, T. S. Eliot, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Zoe Wicomb, Yvette Christianse, and Chris van Wyk, the book demonstrates how Britain's former African colonies influence British culture just as much as African culture was influenced by British colonization. The book brings a uniquely informed perspective to the topic, having lived in South Africa, Tanzania, and Great Britain, and having taught African literature for over a decade. The book demonstrates expert knowledge of local cultural history from 1945 to the present, in both Africa and Britain.

It has long been accepted that film helped shape the Modernist novel and that Modernist poetry would be inconceivable without the typewriter. Yet radio, a key influence on Modernist literature, remains the invisible medium. The contributors to this book argue that radio led to changes in textual and generic forms. Modernist authors embraced the emerging medium, creating texts that were to be heard but not read, incorporating the device into their stories, and using it to publicize their work. They saw in radio the same spirit of experimentation that animated Modernism itself. Because early broadcasts were rarely recorded, radio's influence on literary Modernism often seems equally ephemeral in the historical record. This book helps fill this void, providing a new perspective for Modernist studies even as it reconfigures the landscape of the era itself.

The author of this book uses the concept of cannibalism (what he calls “dismemberment, ingestion, and reprocessing”) to describe Joyce's incorporation of so many literary and cultural allusions, both “high” and “popular.” Beginning with examples of actual and symbolic cannibalism that fascinated Joyce — the Donner party, the Catholic Eucharist — the author moves on to the ways Joyce appropriated language and elements of material culture into his work. This book offers a wide range of connections and insights. A look at Berlitz's approach to teaching language leads to an examination of Joyce's aesthetic of disjunction in language. The author compares Joyce and Joseph Conrad in light of the difficulties of modernism for readers through a discussion of the condom. By focusing attention on colonial tales of cannibalism and Britain's treatment of the Irish, he provides a unique perspective on Joyce's politics.

Although numerous critics and scholars have considered the influence of Joyce's Catholicism on his works, most seem to have concluded that Joyce's intention was to subvert the church's power. This book argues, on the contrary, that the net result of Joyce's Catholic nostalgia is an entanglement in rather than a liberation from the labyrinthine ways of theological exposition and Catholic ritual and politics, which has inspired in his readers an enduring admiration for institutional Catholicism. The author explores the ways in which specific Catholic rituals and devotions vigorously promoted by the Catholic Church during the “Crisis in Modernism” (1850–1960) caused a nostalgic reaction in Joyce that informs and permeates his work. She also traces the subtle and direct influence Joyce had on the Catholic thinking of a diverse group of subsequent writers. She demonstrates that Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald seem to effect this nostalgia in their work in spite of themselves, while Flannery O'Connor and Thomas Merton purposely elicit it. The book also discusses Joyce's enduring belief in the immortal soul and the religious faith and doubt of Merton.

While covering all the major work produced by Geoffrey Chaucer in his pre-Canterbury Tales career, this book seeks to correct the traditional interpretations of these poems. The author provides new interpretations of the three “dream visions” — Book of the Duchess, Parliament of Fowls, and House of Fame — as well as Chaucer's early masterwork Troilus and Criseyde. He draws a series of portraits of Chaucer as glimpsed in his work: the fledgling poet who is seeking to master the artificial style of French love poetry, the passionate author attempting to rebut critics of his work, and, finally, the master of a naturalistic style entirely his own.

“Sasha” was the code name adopted by Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay (1889–1948) to foil investigations of his life and work. Over a period of two decades, the FBI, U.S. State Department, British police and intelligence, and French law enforcement and colonial authorities took turns harassing McKay, an openly gay, Marxist, Jamaican expatriate who had left the United States and was living in Europe. This study of four of McKay's texts—a literary, cultural, and historical analysis to address the multilayered “queer black anarchism” in McKay's writings—argues that McKay's “fringe” perspective not only targeted him for investigation but also contributed to a declining literary reputation. Perceived as mystifying and unacceptable because of his dedication to communism, McKay is perplexing and difficult to classify within the traditional constructs of the Harlem Renaissance. This book analyzes three of the most important works in McKay's career—the Jazz Age bestseller Home to Harlem, the négritude manifesto Banjo, and the unpublished Romance in Marseille. The book uncovers ways in which Home to Harlem assembles a home-front queer black anarchism, and treats Banjo as a novel that portrays Marxist internationalist sexual dissidence. It assesses the consequence of McKay's landmark Romance in Marseille, a text that is, despite its absence from broad public access for nearly 80 years, conceivably the most significant early black Diaspora text. Finally, it examines McKay's extensive FBI file and his late-1930s autobiography,A Long Way from Home, in which McKay disguises his past as a means of eluding his harassers.