December 2, 2010

"Offering a model for thinking about the relationships between literature and social action, Peterson recovers a heterogeneous tradition among African American women in different locations in the antebellum North, whose participants used words in unconventional ways to effect political change."

Recommended by Samuel Otter, Professor of English and author of Philadelphia Stories: America's Literature of Race and Freedom.

"In this remarkable novel, the historical displacements, fraught geography, intricate verbal surfaces, and elusive points of view challenge our understandings of race, class, and freedom, text and context, and literary place."

"Providing a model of transformative literary and intellectual history, Sundquist expands and revises Matthiessen’s story of nineteenth-century American literature, showing how African American and European American writers were entangled in debates about slavery, freedom, revolution, the color line, and the meanings of Africa."

Recommended by Samuel Otter, Professor of English and author of Philadelphia Stories: America's Literature of Race and Freedom.

"Victor Shklovsky's seminal 1917 essay, 'Art as Technique,' included in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, contends that artistic language impedes and alters perception."

 "Along with Julie Winch's Philadelphia’s Black Elite: Activism, Accommodation, and the Struggle for Autonomy, 1787-1848 (Temple, 1988), Forging Freedom reorients our perspectives on Philadelphia and United States history, examining the roles played by the city’s African American communities, their ideological struggles, and their unstable social position."

 "Matthiessen offers a defining, much contested, wide-ranging, still impressive argument about the aesthetic and political emergence of an American literary tradition in the debates among a crucial set of writers about symbolism and democracy."

Recommended by Samuel Otter, Professor of English and author of Philadelphia Stories: America's Literature of Race and Freedom.

"Concentrating on one neighborhood in Philadelphia, Lapsansky analyzes the relationships between the city’s vaunted grid plan and its actual settlement and evolution; in doing so, she meditates on the revelatory status of the particular."

 "Rejecting a narrative in which the trajectory from slavery to freedom involves a clean break and exclusive states, Hartman analyzes the dilemma of African Americans under freedom, in which individuals are burdened with an emancipation that is also a subordination and a probation."

Recommended by Samuel Otter, Professor of English and author of Philadelphia Stories: America's Literature of Race and Freedom.

"Glaude takes seriously, rather than judges or dismisses, the emphasis on moral reform among some African American thinkers in the early-nineteenth century, acknowledging the significance of theology and morality and offering a complex account of racial solidarity, then and now."

Recommended by Samuel Otter, Professor of English and author of Philadelphia Stories: America's Literature of Race and Freedom.