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American cultural life depends on a discontinuity between conservative feeling & liberal thinking. The source of the conservative impulse, as shown by our literature, is that nostalgia for the simpler, happier way of life which we have from the beginning felt to be receding into oblivion. We value with our conservative instincts that which history has already rendered irrelevant to the formation of our ideas. The works of Whitman, Melville, Edith Wharton, H. Adams, H. James, Wallace Stevens, the regionalists, & others are discussed in terms of this contradiction. The fundamental purpose of conservatism must always be to remove or reconcile contradictions & polarities, for such oppositions are the perennial source of unrest & change. Programmatic conservatism in America looks to literature for a reconciliation of impulse & idea; since literature could hardly exist without an interpenetration of the one by the other. In much of the most characteristic American writing, impulse & idea are forced apart into a radical opposition. In preserving a vivid distinction between conservative impulse & radical idea American writers - Melville, Hawthorne, & Faulkner no less than Emerson & Whitman - disqualify themselves as conservatives. In the essentials of their art they both mirror & reassert a secular, skeptical, democratic world. J. A. Fishman.

Cover -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Foreword -- Acknowledgements -- Notes on the Contributors -- Introduction -- Part I: Hunting and Consuming Animals -- 1 'Our sep'rate Natures are the same': Reading Blood Sports in Irish Poetry of the Long Eighteenth Century -- 2 Quick Red Foxes: Irish Women Write the Hunt -- 3 Dennis O'Driscoll's Beef with the Celtic Tiger -- 4 Porcine Pasts and Bourgeois Pigs: Consumption and the Irish Counterculture -- Part II: Gender, Sexuality, and Animals

In Mobilities and Cosmopolitanisms in African and Afrodiasporic Literatures , Anna-Leena Toivanen explores the representations and relationship of mobilities and cosmopolitanisms in Franco- and Anglophone African and Afrodiasporic literary texts from the 1990s to the 2010s. Representations of mobility practices are discussed against three categories of cosmopolitanism reflecting the privileged, pragmatic, and critical aspects of the concept. The main scientific contribution of Toivanen's book is its attempt to enhance dialogue between postcolonial literary studies and mobilities research. The book criticises reductive understandings of 'mobility' as a synonym for migration, and problematises frequently made links between mobility and cosmopolitanism. Mobilities and Cosmopolitanisms adopts a comparative approach to Franco- and Anglophone African and Afrodiasporic literatures, often discussed separately despite their common themes and parallel paths

It is noted that the 'committee approach to soc problemsolving' tends to exclude artists & writers from such committees. Yet both art & writing are seen as capable of making an important contribution to an individual's racial & soc identity. The present black cultural revolution in the US stresses the primacy of black consciousness. Literature can be used both as a means of expressing racial identity & as a means of expressing a more personal identity. In broadening the conception of reality, art has a natural tendency to make people more aware of other life styles & more tolerant of diversity. In literature one tends to understand first & judge later. It is in the area of race relations that the skills & perceptions which are developed & sharpened by the study of imaginative literature can come into full play. But whatever racial insights can be gained from such involvement must always be regarded in the context of a total literary experience-racial understanding being only a component of aa larger psychol'al awareness. The scope of the black literature curriculum, whether focusing on African, West Indian, or Amer black literature, should include not only imaginative literature written in the traditional genres -the novel, the short story, poetry, & the drama-but should also include `non-literary' forms such as the folktale, which has so influenced the style & content of more formal black literary expression, or the blues. The emphasis is on works of the imagination; the appeal is to the imagination. Somehow the gap between the races must be bridged. It will take an extraordinary effort on the part of the imagination of people everywhere. M. Maxfield.

Abstract: In "Peripheralities: 'Minor' Literatures, Women's Literature, and Adrienne Orosz de Csicser's Novels" Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek discusses events surrounding Adrienne Orosz de Csicser's (1878-1934) work. For the contextualization
of the events Tötösy de Zepetnek employs his own framework of "comparative cultural studies" here applied to "minor literatures" (i.e., peripheral) and women's literature and Shunqing Cao's "variation theory." While Orosz's novels are
not considered exceptional, the author achieved notoriety after locked up in a mental institution. In addition to three published novels, in an unpublished novel (excerpts of which she read at various literary and social gatherings) Orosz narrates her love affair with a Roman Catholic bishop.
Knowledge about her novel's contents resulted in the bishop orchestrating Orosz's commitment to a mental hospital. The context in which Orosz's texts are located in is the socio-political situation in Hungarian society prior to and shortly after the First World War.