Robert Levine examines the American romance in a new historical context. His book offers a fresh reading of the genre, establishing its importance to American culture between the founding of the Republic and the Civil War. With convincing historical and literary detail, Levine shows that anxieties about foreign elements--French revolutionaries, secret societies, Catholic immigrants, African slaves--are central to the fictional worlds of Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne and Melville. Ormond, The Bravo, The Blithedale Romance, and Benito Cereno are persuasively explicated by Levine to demonstrate that the romance dramatized the same conflicts and ideals that gave rise to the American Republic. Americans conceived "America" as a historical romance, and their romances dramatize the historical conditions of the culture. The fear that reputed conspiracies would subvert the order and integrity of the new nation were recurrent and widespread; Levine illuminates the influence of such fears on the works of major romance writers during this period.

Conspiracy Theories in the United States and the Middle East is the first book to approach conspiracy theorizing from a decidedly comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. Whereas previous studies have engaged with conspiracy theories within national frameworks only, this collection of essays draws attention to the fact that conspiracist visions are transnational narratives that travel between and connect different cultures. It focuses on the United States and the Middle East because these two regions of the world are entangled in manifold ways and conspiracy theories are currently extremely prominent in both. The contributors to the volume are scholars of Middle Eastern Studies, Anthropology, History, Political Science, Cultural Studies, and American Studies, who approach the subject from a variety of different theories and methodologies. However, all of them share the fundamental assumption that conspiracy theories must not be dismissed out of hand or ridiculed. Usually wrong and frequently dangerous, they are nevertheless articulations of and distorted responses to needs and anxieties that must be taken seriously. Focusing on individual case studies and displaying a high sensitivity for local conditions and the cultural environment, the essays offer a nuanced image of the workings of conspiracy theories in the United States and the Middle East.

Why is Fifty Shades of Grey like the Higgs boson? Who would Kristen Stewart play in a movie of Ulysses? Is the answer 42? Would Jane Eyre prefer Hamlet or Claudius? And is research really like romance? You will find the answers to all the above questions, and many others, in this book

A sweeping argument that from the mid-seventeenth century until the mid-twentieth, the English-language novel encoded ideas equating race with liberty.

Jaen joins a band of misfit pirates on one last salvage mission. She’s here to make a quick buck and get out. Fast. Falling in love is the last thing on her mind. She comes from a world and time where romance always comes with a steep price. Jaen can’t lose more than she already has in the war that devastated her colony. Then she meets him… The brooding, horned alien male, Gavriel, is exactly like every other space pirate. Cold. Dark. Seductive. He’s got a chiseled body from fighting his way across the galaxy and a warrior’s heart to match. But he’s the last alien in the universe Jaen should ever end up with… Pirates are too dangerous and she’s been burned too many times to count. What makes Gavriel so different from the rest?

Drawing on critical and theoretical work by Miller, Boone, Foucault, Jameson, and others, as well as cultural history, affect theory, and contemporary psychiatric literature, the author defines and explores what he calls the Victorian "conspiracy narrative tradition"--a tradition which embraces classic Victorian works like Bleak House, Great Expectations, Villette, and The Moonstone, as well as later Victorian and Edwardian novels by James, Conrad, and Chesterton, and early spy thrillers such as The Riddle of the Sands and The Thirty-Nine Steps. In reading these works as instances of a single literary tradition, the conspiracy narrative tradition, the author traces how the representation of conspiracy changes in nineteenth-century British literature and argues that many of these changes occur in response to significant Victorian-era developments, such as the European revolutions of 1848-49, the rise of British law enforcement agencies, the growth of Irish Fenian terrorism, and the fin-de-siècle waning of the British Empire. The book also explores the roles that conspiratorial indeterminacy and irony play in shaping the Victorian conspiracy narrative tradition and examines how modern works by Proust, Kafka, and Pynchon appropriate elements from Victorian conspiracy narratives. Finally, in using recent work on affect theory as well as studies of paranoia by Freud, Shapiro, and Meissner, the book traces how Victorian works fashion the paranoid subject, a discursive process that ultimately leads to the emergence of the modern fictional conspiracy theorist.

Nineteenth century medievalism is usually associated with Scott's world of Ivanhoe , but Romantic Medievalism argues that Scott's is a conservative use of the past and that radical poets such as the young Coleridge, Keats and Shelley used the medieval to critique and change, rather than validate, the present. These poets identified with the troubadour of courtly love, a disempowered figure often politically at odds with the establishment figure of the knight.

Most of the essays in James Fenimore Cooper: New Historical and Literary Contexts are either directly or indirectly informed by the need to confront Cooper's tales with the indeterminate historical context from which they arose. Others start from the premise that our understanding of Cooper's work can benefit significantly from displacing it from its traditional position in American literary history and by repositioning it in a new literary context. What unites all the essays is a commitment to read Cooper's works as culturally-encoded documents that both reflect and give us access to the complex, equivocal mind that created them. This is not to say that the essays share a common critical or methodological approach; indeed, they were commissioned and selected with the specific intention of applying contending approaches in contemporary literary discourse to the canonical Cooper. While the array of critical approaches represented in the book is by no means exhaustive, interpretive strategies vary from textual, formalistic New Critical readings to old historical, contextual readings, and from new historical, revisionist readings to deconstructive readings. Through their critical diversity these essays will cast a new light on Cooper's work in relation to its historical context, and on the relevance of Cooper's work to both nineteenth-century and modern literary, historical, and ideological debates.