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Embodiment and Legal Theory: Law in Fifty Shades of Grey
by Kirsty DuncansonThis book addresses the importance of the body in legal theory, through an analysis of the film Fifty Shades of Grey.As physical beings, we experience law in sensations of outrage when it is applied unethically, righteousness when it finds justice, and joy when it establishes partnerships in marriage. Our bodies feel and know law. In Embodiment and Legal Theory, it is argued that our bodies also theorise law. It is proposed that our bodies are involved in comprehending, negotiating, and reimagining the legal concepts that shape our lives. As a medium designed to engage us by stimulating our bodily reactions of tears, laughter, shock, and titillation, cinema provides an ideal site for exploring how bodies participate in legal arguments and the construction of legal meaning. For this reason, through a deep analysis of the film Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), this book presents a theory of embodied jurisprudence.At the intersection of legal theory and film studies, this book will appeal to students and scholars in both these areas, as well as in criminology and cultural studies.
Embodiment and the Cosmic Perspective in Twentieth-Century Fiction (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature)
by Marco CaraccioloIn dialogue with groundbreaking technologies and scientific models, twentieth century fiction presents readers with a vast mosaic of perspectives on the cosmos. The literary imagination of the world beyond the human scale, however, faces a fundamental difficulty: if, as researchers in both cognitive science and narrative theory argue, fiction is a practice geared toward the human embodied mind, how can it cope with scientific theories and concepts— the Big Bang, quantum physics, evolutionary biology, and so on—that resist our common-sense intuitions and appear discontinuous, in spatial as well as temporal terms, with our bodies? This book sets out to answer this question by showing how the embodiment of mind continues to matter even as writers— and readers—are pushed out of their terrestrial comfort zone. Offering thoughtful commentary on work by both mainstream literary authors and science fiction writers (from Primo Levi to Jeanette Winterson, from Olaf Stapledon to Pamela Zoline), Embodiment and the Cosmic Perspective in Twentieth-Century Fiction explores the multiple ways in which narrative can radically defamiliarize our bodily experience and bridge the gap with cosmic realities. This investigation affords an opportunity to reflect on the role of literature as it engages with science and charts its epistemological and ethical ramifications.
Embodiment, Relation, Community: A Continental Philosophy of Communication
by Garnet C. ButchartIn this volume, Garnet C. Butchart shows how human communication can be understood as embodied relations and not merely as a mechanical process of transmission. Expanding on contemporary philosophies of speech and language, self and other, and community and immunity, this book challenges many common assumptions, constructs, and problems of communication theory while offering compelling new resources for future study.Human communication has long been characterized as a problem of transmitting information, or the “outward” sharing of “inner thought” through mediated channels of exchange. Butchart questions that model and the various theories to which it gives rise. Drawing from the work of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Lacan—thinkers who, along with Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault, have critiqued the modern notion of a rational subject—Butchart shows that the subject is shaped by language rather than preformed, and that humans embody, and not just use, the signs and contexts of interaction that form what he calls a “communication community.”Accessibly written and engagingly researched, Embodiment, Relation, Community is relevant for researchers and advanced students of communication, cultural studies, translation, and rhetorical studies, especially those who work with a humanistic or interpretive paradigm.
Embodiment, Relation, Community: A Continental Philosophy of Communication
by Garnet C. ButchartIn this volume, Garnet C. Butchart shows how human communication can be understood as embodied relations and not merely as a mechanical process of transmission. Expanding on contemporary philosophies of speech and language, self and other, and community and immunity, this book challenges many common assumptions, constructs, and problems of communication theory while offering compelling new resources for future study.Human communication has long been characterized as a problem of transmitting information, or the “outward” sharing of “inner thought” through mediated channels of exchange. Butchart questions that model and the various theories to which it gives rise. Drawing from the work of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Lacan—thinkers who, along with Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault, have critiqued the modern notion of a rational subject—Butchart shows that the subject is shaped by language rather than preformed, and that humans embody, and not just use, the signs and contexts of interaction that form what he calls a “communication community.”Accessibly written and engagingly researched, Embodiment, Relation, Community is relevant for researchers and advanced students of communication, cultural studies, translation, and rhetorical studies, especially those who work with a humanistic or interpretive paradigm.
Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture
by Lisa WoolforkThis study explores contemporary novels, films, performances, and reenactments that depict American slavery and its traumatic effects by invoking a time-travel paradigm to produce a representational strategy of "bodily epistemology." Disrupting the prevailing view of traumatic knowledge that claims that traumatic events are irretrievable and accessible only through oblique reference, these novels and films circumvent the notion of indirect reference by depicting a replaying of the past, forcing present-day protagonists to witness and participate in traumatic histories that for them are neither dead nor past. Lisa Woolfork cogently analyzes how these works deploy a representational strategy that challenges the divide between past and present, imparting to their recreations of American slavery a physical and emotional energy to counter America's apathetic or amnesiac attitude about the trauma of the slave past.
Embodying Beauty: Twentieth-Century American Women Writers' Aesthetics
by Malin PereiraFirst Published in 2000. This study stands alone in pairing black and white American women writers across the twentieth century on the intertwined issues of female beauty and literary aesthetics. Other studies published during the late 1980s and early 1990s—such as Aldon Lynn Nielsen’s Reading Race: White American Poets and the Racial Discourse in the Twentieth Century (1988), Dana B. Nelson’s The Word in Black and White: Reading "Race" in American Literature, 1638-1867 (1992), Eric J. Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1993), and Laura Doyle’s Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture (1994)—have also engaged in the process of reading racialist discourse in white texts or in attempting to construct a dialogue between black and white texts. None, however, has been concerned with female beauty and literary aesthetics in relation to twentieth-century American women writers and race.
Embodying Beauty: Twentieth-Century American Women Writers' Aesthetics (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)
by Malin PereiraFirst Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Embodying Difference: Critical Phenomenology and Narratives of Disability, Race, and Sexuality
by Simon DickelThis book explores how phenomenological ideas about embodiment, perception, and lived experience are discussed within disability studies, critical race theory, and queer studies. Building on these disciplines, it offers readings of memoirs and novels that address the consequences of stigmatization and the bodily dimensions of social differences. The texts include Robert F. Murphy’s The Body Silent, Simi Linton’s My Body Politic, Rod Michalko’s The Two-in-One: Walking with Smokie, Walking with Blindness, three memoirs by Stephen Kuusisto, Vincent O. Carter’s The Bern Book, as well as two novels, Matthew Griffin’s Hide and Armistead Maupin’s Maybe the Moon. All of the texts discussed in this book negotiate the significance of bodily and perceptual habits, the influence of language and culture on embodiment, the importance of relationality and community, the severe effects of misrecognition, and the possibilities of emancipation and social recognition. Hence, they are read as pioneering contributions to the emerging field of critical phenomenology.
Embodying Gender and Age in Speculative Fiction: A Biopsychosocial Approach (Children's Literature and Culture)
by Derek J. ThiessFollowing scholarship on gender in science fiction, this book explores the limits of considering age as a social construction, positing that an acknowledgement of aged bodies necessarily changes the way we read both age and science fiction. The volume employs contemporary clinical psychology, the biopsychosocial model, to demonstrate that age is an important and neglected topic relevant to the study of speculative fiction. While gender offers a vocabulary, the biopsychosocial approach provides a method to consider age (and gender) as an embodied synthesis of physicality, psychology, and social environment. This respected model of clinical psychology allows a unique and innovative lens through which to read age and the body in literature. Thiess offers readings of established sf classics including Octavia Butler’s Parable series; Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game; and cyberpunk authors such as Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, and Neal Stephenson, also exploring more mainstream speculative works including Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series and Joss Whedon’s Firefly/Serenity. Visiting topics such as care work, sexuality, sport, and the military in these works, the book demonstrates that acknowledging a more fully embodied age is not only necessary for the individual subject, but will also enrich our understanding of other social categories, including gender and race. Taking a constructive—rather than adversarial—stance, this book does not merely question how much one can ethically and responsibly "bend" age, but suggests there is a great deal to learn when one explores those limits.
Embodying Intercultural Capacities: The Pedagogic Impact of Study Abroad
by Kate NaiduThis book examines the extent to which in-country education contributes to the development of intercultural capacities among students and investigates how this occurs. It examines the experiences of Australian university students participating in educational programs in Indonesia and critiques and extends notions of interculturality. The potential development of intercultural capacities is explored in relation to four key themes: pedagogy, temporality, home, and culture. The book demonstrates that interculturalisation is not an automatic or guaranteed result of simply being ‘immersed’ in-country, but rather involves an array of pedagogic processes (involving both human and non-human actors). It outlines the temporal dimensions of in-country education, examining the experience as part of a broader trajectory, involving significant moments, and a range of engagements with diverse temporal rhythms. The book concludes by exploring how students’ understandings of ‘culture’ and ‘cultural difference’ impact the way in which the study-abroad experience is navigated. Readers will gain a deepened understanding of how intercultural capacities develop, which can be applied to other educational contexts including schools, as well as corporate and not-for-profit settings. Those interested in sociology, particularly Bourdieusian analysis, will also benefit from this empirical application (and extension) of the notion of habitus in the context of student mobility. “This is a well conceptualized and beautifully written book that explores how study abroad programs can play an important role in equipping young people to navigate the super-diversity that has now become a critical feature of societies around the world. It shows how such programs have the potential to enhance intercultural capacities, especially when crafted in ways that are thoughtfully fashioned and carefully enacted.” — Fazal Rizvi, University of Melbourne Australia
Embodying Language in Action: The Artistry of Process Drama in Second Language Education
by Erika PiazzoliThis book explores embodiment in second language education, sociocultural theory and research. It focuses on process drama, an embodied approach that engages learners’ imagination, body and voice to create a felt-experience of the second language and culture. Divided into three parts, it begins by examining the aesthetic and intercultural dimension of performative language teaching, the elements of drama and knowing-in-action. The central part of the book examines issues related to play, emotions, classroom discourse and assessment when learning a language through process drama, in a sociocultural perspective. The third part is an analysis of the author’s qualitative research, which informs a subtle discussion on reflective practitioner methodology, learner engagement and teacher artistry. Each chapter includes a drama workshop, illustrating in practice what embodying language in action can look like when working with asylum seekers, adult learners with intellectual disabilities, pre-service teachers, international students and children involved in a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) programme. A unique combination of theory, research and reflective practice, this book provides valuable insights for teacher/artists, teacher educators and researchers in the fields of performative and sociocultural language learning.
Embodying Pessoa
by Anna Klobucka Mark Sabinehe multifaceted and labyrinthine oeuvre of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is distinguished by having been written and published under more than seventy different names. These were not mere pseudonyms, but what Pessoa termed 'heteronyms,' fully realized identities possessed not only of wildly divergent writing styles and opinions, but also of detailed biographies. In many cases, their independent existences extended to their publication of letters and critical readings of each other's works (and those of Pessoa 'himself').Long acclaimed in continental Europe and Latin America as a towering presence in literary modernism, Pessoa has more recently begun to receive the attention of an English-speaking public. Embodying Pessoa responds to this new growth of interest. The collection's twelve essays, preceded by a general introduction and grouped into four themed sections, apply a range of current interpretative models both to the more familiar canon of Pessoa's output, and to less familiar texts - in many cases only recently published. As a whole, this work diverges from traditional Pessoa criticism by testifying to the importance of corporeal physicality in his heteronymous experiment and to the prominence of representations of (gendered) sexuality in his work.
Emboscada: La historia oculta de la desaparición de Rodolfo Walsh y el misterio de sus cuentos inéditos
by Facundo PastorFacundo Pastor reconstruye la emboscada que terminó hace 45 años con la desaparición de Rodolfo Walsh, en la que no faltan doble agentes, traiciones y documentos de inteligencia militar, ocultos hasta hoy. Y también desentraña otro misterio: el destino de algunos cuentos del periodista, que aún, y como su cuerpo, siguen sin aparecer. Aquel mediodía del 25 de marzo de 1977, hace 45 años, Rodolfo Walsh llegó puntual a una cita que tenía programada en la esquina de las avenidas San Juan y Entre Ríos, en el centro de la ciudad de Buenos Aires. La reunión había sido confirmada respetando los códigos de seguridad de la clandestinidad: contraseñas secretas y chequeos telefónicos. No sabía que, en verdad, un operativo, que incluía un francotirador, lo estaba esperando para capturarlo. En esta investigación, Facundo Pastor reconstruye, con ritmo de novela policial, cómo se armó la emboscada que terminó con la desaparición de Rodolfo Walsh, en la que no faltan dobles agentes, traiciones y una serie de documentos desclasificados de inteligencia militar que permanecían secretos hasta este libro. Y también intenta desentrañar otro misterio: el destino de los papeles personales y algunos cuentos del periodista que aún hoy, y como su cuerpo siguen sin aparecer.
Embroidering The Scarlet A: Unwed Mothers And Illegitimate Children In American Fiction And Film
by Janet Mason EllerbyEmbroidering the Scarlet A traces the evolution of the "fallen woman" from the earliest novels to recent representations in fiction and film, including The Scarlet Letter, The Sound and the Fury, The Color Purple, and Love Medicine, and the films Juno and Mother and Child. Interweaving her own experience as a pregnant teen forced to surrender her daughter and pledge secrecy for decades, Ellerby interrogates "out-of-wedlock" motherhood, mapping the ways archetypal scarlet women and their children have been exiled as social pariahs, pardoned as blameless pawns, and transformed into empowered women. Drawing on narrative, feminist, and autobiographical theory, the book examines the ways that the texts have affirmed, subverted, or challenged dominant thinking and the prevailing moral standards as they have shifted over time. Using her own life experience and her uniquely informed perspective, Ellerby assesses the effect these stories have on the lives of real women and children. By inhabiting the space where ideology meets narrative, Ellerby questions the constricting historical, cultural, and social parameters of female sexuality and permissible maternity. As a feminist cultural critique, a moving autobiographical journey, and an historical investigation that addresses both fiction and film, Embroidering the Scarlet A will appeal to students and scholars of literature, history, sociology, psychology, women's and gender studies, and film studies. The book will also interest general readers, as it relates the experience of surrendering a child to adoption at a time when birthmothers were still exiled, birth records were locked away, and secrecy was still mandatory. It will also appeal to those concerned with adoption or the cultural shifts that have changed our thinking about illegitimacy.
Embryology and the Rise of the Gothic Novel (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine)
by Diana Pérez EdelmanThis book argues that embryology and the reproductive sciences played a key role in the rise of the Gothic novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Diana Pérez Edelman dissects Horace Walpole’s use of embryological concepts in the development of his Gothic imagination and provides an overview of the conflict between preformation and epigenesis in the scientific community. The book then explores the ways in which Gothic literature can be read as epigenetic in its focus on internally sourced modes of identity, monstrosity, and endless narration. The chapters analyze Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto; Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance, The Italian, and The Mysteries of Udolpho; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer; and James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, arguing that these touchstones of the Gothic register why the Gothic emerged at that time and why it continues today: the mysteries of reproduction remain unsolved.
Emer de Vattel and the Politics of Good Government: Constitutionalism, Small States and the International System
by Antonio TrampusThis book explores the history of the international order in the eighteenth and nineteenth century through a new study of Emer de Vattel’s Droit des gens (1758). Drawing on unpublished sources from European archives and libraries, the book offers an in-depth account of the reception of Vattel’s chief work. Vattel’s focus on the myth of good government became a strong argument for republicanism, the survival of small states, drafting constitutions and reform projects and fighting everyday battles for freedom in different geographical, linguistic and social contexts. The book complicates the picture of Vattel’s enduring success and usefulness, showing too how the work was published and translated to criticize and denounce the dangerousness of these ideas. In doing so, it opens up new avenues of research beyond histories of international law, political and economic thought.
Emergence and Empire: Innis, Complexity, and the Trajectory of History
by John BonnettHarold Innis was one of the most profound thinkers that Canada ever produced. Such was his influence on the field of communication that Marshall McLuhan once declared his own work was a mere footnote to Innis. But over the past sixty years scholars have had a hard time explaining his brilliance, in large measure because Innis's dense, elliptical writing style has hindered easy explication and interpretation. But behind the dense verbiage lies a profound philosophy of history. In Emergence and Empire, John Bonnett offers a fresh take on Innis's work by demonstrating that his purpose was to understand the impact of self-organizing, emergent change on economies and societies. Innis's interest in emergent change induced him to craft an original and bold philosophy of history informed by concepts as diverse as information, Kantian idealism, and business cycle theory. Bonnett provides a close reading of Innis's oeuvre that connects works of communication and economic history to present a fuller understanding of Innis's influences and influence. Emergence and Empire presents a portrait of an original and prescient thinker who anticipated the importance of developments such as information visualization and whose understanding of change is remarkably similar to that which is promoted by the science of complexity today.
Emergence of Korean English: How Korea's Dynamic English is Born (Routledge Studies in East Asian Translation)
by Jieun Kiaer Hyejeong AhnEmergence of Korean English explores the dynamic nature of emerging Korean English and its impact on Korean society, culture, and identity. This book challenges the negative stereotypes and stigmatization of Konglish and argues that it has been a great asset for Korea’s fast economic development. The fate of Korean English has been transformed in the time of the Korean wave as the K-fandom actively engages with Korean English. The book offers a comprehensive overview of Korea’s encounter with the English language and provides an in-depth analysis of linguistic characteristics, pragmatic features, and cross-cultural and cross-linguistic aspects of Korean English. The authors examine the unique linguistic features of Korean English, including phonological, syntactic, and lexical features, and highlight the sociocultural implications of these features for Korean society. In addition, the book discusses the role of Hallyu fandom languages in the emergence of Korean English and the growth of Korean pop culture worldwide. It also provides insights into the English fever in South Korea and its impact on education, society, and culture. This book is a valuable resource for scholars, students, and professionals who are interested in the emergence of Korean English and its social, cultural, and linguistic implications for Korea and the global community.
Emergency Communication: The Organization of Calls to Emergency Dispatch Centers
by Giolo FeleThis book explores communication in emergency call and response centers, taking an approach drawn from Conversation Analysis to examine how call-takers answer calls and the ways in which dispatch is issued in different contexts. It offers an original contribution to the study of the organization of emergency calls, the ways such calls are treated, and some of the practical problems that emerge when dealing with them. The author offers a systematic review of studies in the international field of the organization of emergency calls, while at the same time providing fresh case studies, illustrated with empirical materials, taken from audio- and video- recordings of the everyday activities of call and response centers. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of social interaction and may be appreciated by all scholars and practitioners working on the social management of emergency situations, including in fields such as Sociolinguistics and Pragmatics.
Emergency Remote Teaching and Beyond: Voices from World Language Teachers and Researchers
by Julian ChenThis timely volume addresses issues pertaining to language teaching, learning and research during the pandemic. In times of a global emergency, the aftermath of emergency remote teaching (ERT) cannot be ignored. The question of how language educators and researchers unleash creativity and employ strategies vis-à-vis ERT still remains to be answered. With practitioners in mind, it covers a broad spectrum of educational settings across continents, target languages and methodologies. Specifically, it reveals viable ways of utilizing digital technologies to bypass social distancing while highlighting the pitfalls and challenges associated with crisis teaching and research. This volume comprises two parts: Teacher Voice vicariously transports readers to practitioners’ compelling stories of how teacher resilience, identity and professional development are crystallized in adaptive pedagogy, online teaching practicum, virtual study programs and communities of practice during ERT. The second part, Researcher Corner, showcases innovative approaches for both novice and seasoned researchers to upskill their toolkits, ranging from case study research and mixed methods designs, to auto- and virtual ethnography and social media research. The array of food for thought provides a positive outlook and inspires us to rethink our current practices and future directions in the post-COVID world. Regardless of their backgrounds and experiences, readers will be able to relate to this accessible volume that harmonizes research and practice, and speaks from the hearts of all the contributors.
Emergent Lingua Francas and World Orders: The Politics and Place of English as a World Language (Routledge Studies in Sociolinguistics)
by Phyllis Ghim-Lian ChewThis book presents an alternative paradigm in understanding and appreciating World Englishes (WEs) in the wake of globalization and its accompanying shifting priorities in many dimensions of modern life, including the emergence of the English language as the dominant lingua franca (ELF). Chew argues that history is a theatre for the realization of lingua francas, offering a model that shows the present as derived from the past and as a bearer of future possibility, the understanding of which is rooted in the understanding of World Englishes and ELF. The book will engage with some of the current theoretical debates in WEs and includes, as a means of fleshing out the model, sociolinguistic case studies of Arabia, China Fujian, and Singapore.
Emergent Literacy and Language Development
by Paula RhynerThis concise, accessible book explores the connection between language acquisition and emergent literacy skills, and how this sets the stage for later literacy development. Chapters address formative early experiences such as speaking and listening, being read to, and talking about print concepts and the alphabet. Written for early childhood professionals, reading specialists, and speech language pathologists, the book describes effective assessment and instructional approaches for fostering language learning and emergent literacy in typically developing children and those at risk for language delays. Vivid case examples illustrate specific ways to collaborate with parents to give all children a strong foundation for school readiness and success.
Emergent Nation: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1660–1714: Volume 3 (Early Modern Literature in Transition)
by Elizabeth SauerThe years 1660 to 1714 represent a fraught transitional period, one caught between two now dominant periodization rubrics: early modern and the long eighteenth century. Containing narratives of disruption, restoration, and reconfiguration, Early Modern Literature in Transition, 1660–1714 explores the conjunctions and disjunctions between historical and literary developments in this period, when the sociable, rivalrous textual world of letters registered and accelerated changes. Each of the volume's four parts highlights the relationship of various literary forms to a different kind of transformation - generic, ideological, cultural, or local. The five chapters in each section rigorously probe the conditions that affected the period's literary transformations, and interrogate the traditions that canonical and less established writers inherited, adapted, and often challenged. In making a case for an early mimetically produced English nation, this book, through its concentration on literary evidence and transitions also makes innovative contributions to an understanding of nationalism in the period.
Emergent Poetics: Ecological Sites in Contemporary Poetry (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)
by Travis W. MattesonThis book proposes the term 'emergent poetics' to synthesize two divergent strands in contemporary literary media theory - the media archaeology of material inscriptions and the systems view of media ecology, which considers media as complex nodes of exchange. Emergent poetics emphasizes the speculative, non-prosthetic quality of media: the anthrodecentric perspective that media do not simply extend human senses, but instead consist of properties that exceed human apprehension. This study builds on Eve Kosofky Sedgwick’s theory of reparative reading, contemporary media theory, and Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, which are united in their skepticism regarding the paranoid “unveiling” gesture of institutional critique, their emphasis on methodology rather than theoretical ideology, and their insistence on assembling rather than deconstructing. In response to these three trends, this project begins by attending to what Jerome McGann calls the bibliographic code (material forms), while simultaneously expanding this medium specific perspective by situating written works within their broader media ecosystems, tracing interactions among media, humans, and nonhumans.
Emergent U.S. Literatures: From Multiculturalism to Cosmopolitanism in the Late Twentieth Century
by Cyrus PatellEmergent U.S. Literatures introduces readers to the foundational writers and texts produced by four literary traditions associated with late-twentieth-century US multiculturalism. Examining writing by Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, and gay and lesbian Americans after 1968, Cyrus R. K. Patell compares and historicizes what might be characterized as the minority literatures within “U.S. minority literature.” Drawing on recent theories of cosmopolitanism, Patell presents methods for mapping the overlapping concerns of the texts and authors of these literatures during the late twentieth century. He discusses the ways in which literary marginalization and cultural hybridity combine to create the grounds for literature that is truly “emergent” in Raymond Williams’s sense of the term—literature that produces “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships” in tension with the dominant, mainstream culture of the United States. By enabling us to see the American literary canon through the prism of hybrid identities and cultures, these texts require us to reevaluate what it means to write (and read) in the American grain. Emergent U.S. Literatures gives readers a sense of how these foundational texts work as aesthetic objects—rather than merely as sociological documents—crafted in dialogue with the canonical tradition of so-called “American Literature,” as it existed in the late twentieth century, as well as in dialogue with each other.