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This article examines the concept of cognitive environment in relation to ecocriticism. It discusses Gaston Bachelard’s analysis, in his The Poetics of Space, of historian Jules Michelet’s work depicting the building of a bird’s nest. It suggests that the corporeal act of nest-building may then be argued to imply the continuity of an organism and its environment and that the notion of enclosure is built into any ecology or Thoreavian economy.

This chapter details the production history and reception of Paul Hallam and Ron Peck’s film Nighthawks (1978), often recognized as a “classic” of British LGBTQ cinema. It centrally engages with Vito Russo’s suggestion that the film offered “a community reaction to itself.” Making the film was a lengthy undertaking: the chapter draws on Peck and Hallam’s archives to reconstruct its creation, and unpacks Peck’s involvement with the Four Corners collective and its influence on the content and form of Nighthawks. The film is situated in relation to key events in British queer history and the landscape of British filmmaking during the decade, as well as in relation to Richard Dyer’s landmark 1977 film season “Images of Homosexuality.” The film’s “sequel,” Strip Jack Naked (1991), is also explored as a partial atonement for Nighthawks’s omissions.

This article examines the relationship between literary critical practice and human rights, and describes the present uses of literary criticism. It analyzes an example of abolitionism and activism as it was conceived and practiced by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, and William Lloyd Garrison. The article evaluates how our understanding of texts and issues today can be informed by our analysis and understanding of the myths and metaphors of who we are that we have inherited from earlier literatures and movements.

This chapter surveys Woolf’s posthumous career. Initially, Woolf’s reception was mixed at best. Her own friend, E.M. Forster, spoke of her feminism in a disparaging fashion, and she was seen as an elitist highbrow. However, by the early 1970s, Woolf was on the rise. Her work was integrated into academia, and Quentin Bell’s biography of his aunt and the steady publication of Woolf’s letters and diaries buttressed Woolf’s reception. Jane Marcus’s scholarship shaped American academia. Brenda R. Silver’s 1999Virginia Woolf Icon on Woolf’s status in popular culture and dedicated publications such as the Virginia Woolf Miscellany (1973–present), Woolf Studies Annual (2005–present), and the annual conferences and selected essays on Woolf (1991–present) furthered Woolf’s status. Edited and annotated editions of Woolf’s work (including those from Shakespeare Head Press and Cambridge University Press) have brought Woolf fully into focus as a major modernist and feminist. This chapter explores these trends in Woolf’s evolving critical and cultural reception.

This article examines what can be learned from nineteenth-century American literature regarding twenty-first-century citizenship. It investigates how the intellectual project of reading and interpreting American literature can prepare us for the deliberative work of democracy and what American literature tells us about this difficult relationship. The article explores how literature can be read politically, and describes the relevant works of Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown.

This chapter describes the model of intuitive morality and exemplars (MIME), which examines connections between moral judgment and exposure to narrative media. The MIME explicates distinct, a priori–defined domains of moral intuitions that cut across cultural boundaries and identifies underlying processes that shape related social perceptions to describe how media and moral judgment are intertwined. The model’s dual-process perspective suggests some moral judgments are determined by quick gut reflexes and others by reflective deliberation. The MIME’s multistage process contains short-term and long-term components. The short-term component describes how exemplars that prime moral intuitions affect the appraisal of media content, which then prompts selective exposure to media that upholds primed intuitions. The long-term component describes how aggregate patterns of exposure to media that upholds primed intuitions encourages further (mass) production of content featuring those intuitions. This reciprocal process describes how media systems and audiences influence the salience of one another’s moral intuitions.

This chapter focuses on various ways in which the rhetoric and visual iconography of the space age and the world of science fiction was explored in the styling and promotion of consumer products from the 1920s to the 1960s, with particular focus on the United States. Such advertising, whether three-dimensional displays, films, posters, or other printed ephemera, was embraced in the futuristic displays of major corporations at hugely popular exhibitions such as the Chicago Century of Progress Exhibition of 1933–34 and the New York World’s Fair (“Building the World of Tomorrow”) of 1939–1940. Also considered are projections of automobiles and appliances of the future, as seen in the dynamic displays of General Motors’ Motoramas and “Kitchens of Tomorrow” exhibitions, the science fiction–inflected language of advertising copy, and the allure of the future for the general public.

For centuries, literary critics have made a division between poetry and prose, believing that poetry focuses on complex interactions between sound and sense, while prose centers on lucid significance. However, this article states that the major Transcendentalists believed that no clear distinction existed between poetry and prose. Supposing that the poetic is at one with the organic, they concluded that prose, if it approached the powers of nature, could qualify as poetry. Hence, the general aesthetics of American Transcendentalism are not confined to poetry but rather include poetry and prose alike. The aesthetic theories of Transcendentalists were vast and deep. They touched all the natural elements and resources and they were defined beautifully elucidating the aesthetic concepts of the Transcendentalists. Emerson tried to write about the world in his earliest book, Nature. Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau, too, persistently worked to transform creatures into conceits and tropes into flora and fauna.

This chapter argues that the prescriptive turn in literary aesthetics over the last two centuries has marginalized science fiction, placing it in the category of the “Sublime” rather than the “Beautiful.” However, this is a position that recent advances in cognitive poetics are in the process of reversing. Stockwell explores the science-fictional beauty of expression, beauty of structure, and beauty of world to propose that the key to the immersive experience of science fiction is that it is a genre of compulsion. Close consideration is given to the work of Ray Bradbury, China Miéville, and Roger Zelazny.

The study of African American folklore has been grounded from its beginnings in the colonial period in discourses and power dynamics of race. This chapter posits that these beginnings have given rise to two folkloristic traditions, with differing agendas, methodologies, aesthetics, relationships to black communities, and investments in race. The mainstream tradition has been aligned with scholarly trends within academe and has seldom focused explicitly on the most pressing concerns of black people, or on the most obvious influence on the creation and expression of black folklore, namely race. The other tradition has been more aligned with the political interests, racial histories, and day-to-day needs of African American communities. This chapter critically examines these two tributaries, relative to issues of race, arguing for an African American folklore and folklife studies that embraces an African American–centered political focus while encompassing the unique intellectual contributions of both.

Can we imagine a future in which the African diaspora is seen as central to the flow of events? This chapter seeks to answer that question through a history of Afrofuturism as a critical term and a critique of the concept as deployed by black and white science fiction writers. The word is presented as a heuristic that makes visible black artistic production of futures that seek escape from dystopian erasures that seem real. The idea captures stories about science, technology, and culture other than those that limit future history to Eurocentric extrapolations. Kilgore argues that the term has allowed both a reconsideration of canonical African-American literature as well as an extension of science fiction’s ability to see prophetically across racial and cultural divides.

This chapter historicizes the work of the New Queer Cinema (NQC), a term coined by the author to describe a group of groundbreaking films that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It argues that the NQC sensibility fueled subsequent imaginative film and television, from makers as diverse as Ang Lee, Todd Haynes, Silas Howard, and Celine Sciamma. At the heart of the chapter is the conviction that contemporary politics demand a new framework for queer and trans media, namely the idea of intersectionality, demonstrated by makers and artists such as Janelle Monae, Allie Logout, Wu Tsang, The Nest Collective, and the trio of Mika Gustafson, Olivia Kastebring, and Christina Tsiobanelis. Intersectionality enables mutuality, recognition, and alliance in a time of deep division and terror; it asks queer media makers to take transgression beyond personal expressions and identity into collective acts of world making.

This article surveys connections between usually crumbling empires, ancient and modern, with the barbarians almost at the gates, and manifestations of cultural or individual decadence. Greek and Roman historians usually disapproved, developing a decadence narrative to explain historical eclipse. But the luxury and wayward behaviors of once mighty empires and narcissistic emperors, ranging from Sardanapalus in ancient Assyria and Xerxes in Persia to Nero and Elagabalus in ancient Rome, sent interestingly mixed messages to modern empires (British, French, German, and Russian), encouraged escapist dreams, and intrigued and stimulated writers such as Byron, Verlaine, Stefan George, Alexander Blok, and Gore Vidal. Was decadence a cause or consequence of imperial weakening? Was it even a perverse consequence of multicultural empire-building in the first instance?

This chapter challenges the long-standing exclusion of single-panel comics from being seen as comics because they do not contain what is commonly regarded as a core feature of the genre: images arranged in a sequence. Accordingly, it offers not merely a defense of but what might even be called a manifesto for single-panel comics as comics. Titles belonging to this category have played an important role in the origins, evolution, and popularization of the genre in the United States. They have embodied some of the most successful and acclaimed works in the history of the medium. In many respects, sequential art as we know it would not be the same without comics that consist of only one panel. Accordingly, this chapter moves single-panel comics back into the genre where they belong. Single-panel comics are not simply comics; they are often examples of the medium at its most concentrated, controlled, and efficient.

This chapter demonstrates that Woolf’s allusive practice involved transforming and interrogating texts rather than invoking the authority of earlier texts or their scholarly interpretations. It shows how Woolf’s allusions are often supported by metaphors that draw attention to the longevity of past literature that is essential to the act of allusion. These include organic metaphors such as the growth of seeds, plants, and flowers; familial metaphors of conception, birth, and reproduction; and the ethereal metaphor of haunting. The chapter examines how Woolf uses allusion and metaphor to articulate relationships with the literary past in A Room of One’s Own and in her representation of characters who are female writers in Night and Day, Orlando, and Between the Acts.

This chapter provides an analysis of Gene Luen Yang’s two-volume set Boxers and Saints, which offers historical fiction about the Boxer Uprising in the visual medium of comics. Embedded with numerous historical references, these graphic narratives unfold around two fictional characters who represent the complexity of a particularly contested period in Chinese history. Little Bao (a Boxer who is inspired by nationalism) and Four-Girl (a Christian convert who seeks belonging through faith) are on opposite sides of the conflict at the time, thus presenting parallel stories that prompt the reader to contemplate the nuances in the historical past. Both characters come to terms with who they are and what they believe in while being spiritually guided by the first Chinese emperor Ch’in Shih-huang and Joan of Arc, respectively. This chapter discusses how Yang’s work visualizes the intersectional images of the “thousand palms with eyes” of Guan Yin (the Buddhist goddess of compassion) and of Jesus Christ and how they present what Paul A. Cohen has called a “historically reconstructed past” in which the Boxers and the Chinese Christians’ encounters are visualized as “event, experience and myth” at the end of the nineteenth century.

Folk dramas and festivals are encapsulated units of culture that distill, concretize, and make manifest through enactment important cultural values and ideas. Bounded in time and space, they offer scholars an isolatable prism through which to examine culture, making them appealing objects of study. They are marked off in time and space and amalgamate other genres such as song, dance, art, costume, food, and narrative to produce synergistic events that are greater than the sum of their parts. They also happen in public arenas, rely on active audience participation, and invoke frameworks of play. Both festivals and folk dramas create alternative worlds in order to transform reality. Festivals in particular are characterized by license, inversion, and a high degree of ambiguity. Which ideas, values, or social arrangements are proposed, whose values they represent, and how these ideas are contested or contradicted in festival and folk drama arenas remain important fields of investigation.

Metropolitan folklore and folklife studies often focus on ethnic, religious, and occupation-centered neighborhoods and their distinctive festive events. The material culture of streets and lots has also led to documentation of folk arts, vernacular structures, and customs that have been adapted to this environment. Examples include sidewalk altars in New York City, painted screens in Baltimore, and storefront churches in Los Angeles. In addition, beginning in the late twentieth century, both urban and suburban folklife studies took on the tinge of consumer culture as tradition and mass media mixed freely in commercial centers. Furthermore, the longstanding critique of suburbia as a homogenizing force has itself become embedded in American legend and belief, but suburbs have developed their own traditions of cookouts, malls, yard art, lawn care, car culture, and other modes of “hanging out.”

This chapter charts the influence of Andy Warhol on filmmaker Tom Kalin and provides an overview of Kalin’s films as well as his activism. From experimental videos such as They are lost to vision altogether (1989) to his features, Swoon (1992) and Savage Grace (2007), Kalin has drawn on Warhol’s cinematic language and bold sexual and gender politics. The chapter also depicts Kalin’s work with the activist collectives ACT UP and Gran Fury. Gran Fury formed to give voice to the political issues surrounding AIDS in America. This eleven-person collective devised appropriation strategies to simultaneously utilize and critique Madison Avenue vernaculars, and circumnavigate questions of access. Named for the automobile used by the New York City police (and also sounding like “big anger”), Gran Fury created public works that drew attention to medical, moral, and political issues related to AIDS.