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At Arm’s Length is a study of the ways that authors manipulate character in children’s and young adult literature in order to create more or less sympathy in the reader. Authors can push character representation and development into several directions: characters can be pushed along a continuum between the sympathetic and the awe-inspiring; characters can be pushed between the sympathetic and pitiful or the ridiculous; last, characters can also be pushed between the awe-inspiring and the pitiful. Authors manipulate character in order to elicit a change in emotional response from the reader toward characters, both major and minor. The author’s manipulation of character is meant to either draw young readers toward characters and a sympathetic (even empathetic) relationship to character, creating vulnerability, or to push back or hold the young reader at arm’s length in order to create emotional distance between the character (and action) and the young reader. This manipulation of character has implications for the ways different types of characters can represent meanings for young readers. Issues of identification, representations of diversity, stereotyping, and more are caught up in the choices authors make about how close to character the reader can get.

The Comics of R. Crumb: Underground in the Art Museum is a ground-breaking collection on the work of a pioneer of underground comix and a fixture of comics culture. Crumb’s work is widely known—he has created the iconic characters Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, and the Snoid, has collaborated on influential autobiographical comics with Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Harvey Pekar, has drawn album covers like Big Brother & the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills, has created popular images like the “Keep on Truckin” illustrations widely reproduced on posters and T-shirts, and has been the subject of a major documentary film, Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb. From his work on underground comix like Zap and Weirdo through the 1960s through the 2000s, to his cultural prominence, Crumb is one of the most renowned comics artists in the medium’s history. And, through his involvement in music, animation, and documentary film projects, Crumb is a widely recognized persona, an artist who has defined the vocation of the cartoonist. This volume contains essays from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives that reflect the breadth of Crumb's work. Ranging from art history and literary studies, to environmental studies and religious history, the essays cast Crumb's work as formally sophisticated and complex in its representations of gender, sexuality, race, politics, and history, while also charting Crumb’s role in underground comix and the ways in which his work has circulated in the art museum. No other comics artist has garnered as much acclaim and controversy as R. Crumb, and this book offers a range of new approaches to the artist’s work.

What do the social sciences have to teach us about comic books and graphic novels? This volume collects essays exploring the social life of comics from a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. Addressing how comics move through and constitute publics in the moments of production, circulation, and reception, The Comics World seeks to model an interdisciplinary comics studies that crosses the social science–humanities divide.

A white woman living in segregated Georgia during the first half of the twentieth century, Lillian Smith surprised readers with stories of mixed-race love affairs, mob attacks on “outsiders,” and young female campers exploring their sexuality. Critical Essays on the Writings of Lillian Smith considers Smith’s evolution from a young girls’ camp director into a courageous artist engaging difficult topics with frankness and courage. She did not pull punches in her portrayals of the South, yet she devoted herself to the artist’s role as she saw it: to lead readers toward a better understanding of themselves and a more fulfilling existence. Smith’s writings cut to the core of the neurotic behaviors she observed and participated in as a Southerner. To draw readers into her exploration of those behaviors, she invites them into compelling stories, employing literary techniques that foster critical reconsideration of stubbornly dominant ideologies. With words as her medium, she sketches maps of fictionalized Southern places, in the process revealing the markers of wounds and disfunction. Smith offers readers an intimate glimpse into her own childhood as well as the psychological traumas that all Southerners experience and help to perpetuate. Comprised of seven essays by contemporary Smith scholars, Critical Essays on the Writings of Lillian Smith explores Smith’s writings in an attempt to yield a clear portrait of this charismatic figure, whose work was crucial in her own time and is profoundly relevant in the twenty-first century, as well.

Velma Pollard and Erna Brodber, two sister-writers born and raised in Jamaica, recreate imagined and lived homelands in their literature by commemorating the history, culture, and religion of the Caribbean. Velma Pollard was born in St. Catherine, Jamaica; by the time Velma Pollard was three, her parents had moved to Woodside, St. Mary, in northeast Jamaica, where her sister, Erna Brodber was born. They write about their homeland in a series of memories and stories of that lived and imagined experience in their many works: fictional, nonfictional, and poetic. They center on their home village, but occasionally move the settings of their writings to other regions of Jamaica and various Caribbean islands, as well as to other parts of the African diaspora in the United States, Canada, and England. The role of women in the patriarchal society of Jamaica and much of the Caribbean is also a subject of the sisters’ writing. Growing up in what Erna Brodber calls the kumbla, the protective but restrictive environment of many women in the Anglo-Caribbean, is also an important theme in their works. In her fiction, Velma Pollard discusses the gender gaps in employment and the demands of marriage and the special contributions of women to family and community. This study examines Erna Brodber’s work on a par with her sister Velma Pollard’s writing and is the first to do so, drawing upon original interviews.

In 1930, the same year he moved into a slave-built antebellum mansion in his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, William Faulkner published his first work of fiction that gave serious attention to the experience and perspective of an enslaved individual. For the next two decades, he repeatedly returned to the theme of slavery and the figures of the enslaved while probing the racial, economic, and political contours of his region, nation, and hemisphere, in fictions including a number of his most important novels: The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses. Slavery’s multifold legacies profoundly shaped Faulkner’s fictions themselves, the world he wrote about, and the world in which he wrote, as detailed in the thirteen essays collected here. Contributors examine the constitutive links among slavery, capitalism, and modernity across Faulkner’s oeuvre; how the history of slavery at the University of Mississippi informs writings like Absalom, Absalom!; trace how slavery’s topologies of the rectilinear grid or square run up against the more reparative geography of the oval in Faulkner’s narratives; explore how slave histories literally sound and resound across centuries of history, and across multiple novels and stories, in Faulkner’s fictional county of Yoknapatawpha; and reveal how the author’s remodeling work on his own residence brought him into an awkward engagement with the spatial and architectural legacies of chattel slavery in north Mississippi. Faulkner and Slavery offers a timely intervention not only in the critical study of the writer’s work but in ongoing national and global conversations about the afterlives of slavery and the necessary work of antiracism.

In contrast to other literary genres, drama has received little attention in southern studies, and women playwrights in general receive less recognition than their male counterparts. This book addresses these gaps in its examination of the work of southern women playwrights, making the argument that representations of the American South on stage are complicated by difficulties of identity, genre, and region. Success in American drama is defined as having a play staged in the capital of theatre culture, New York City, the city that might be viewed as most antithetical to the South in terms of geography and ideology. Further, women playwrights, women playwrights of color, and those who express queer identities have been vocal about persistent inequities in American theatre which have created obstacles to their success. Drama creates unique problems for playwrights through its concentrated focus on place, dialect, and character; the multiple layers of authorship; the collective reception format; and the demand for exaggeration within production. These issues, as they interact with regional conditions and perceptions, pose problems for southern women playwrights in navigating how to represent a marginalized region on the stage. Through analysis of the dramatic texts, the rhetoric of reviews of productions, as well as what the playwrights themselves have said about their plays and its productions, this book delineates these challenges and argues that playwrights confront obstacles through various conscious strategies. These approaches lead audiences to reconsider monolithic understandings of northern and southern regions and ultimately, they create new visions of the South.

Policing Intimacy analyzes literary depictions of sexual policing of the color line across multiple spaces with diverse colonial histories: Mississippi through William Faulkner’s work, Louisiana through Ernest Gaines’s novels, Haiti through the work of Marie Chauvet and Edwidge Danticat, and the Dominican Republic through writing by Julia Alvarez, Junot Díaz, and Nelly Rosario. This literature exposes the continuing coloniality that links depictions of U.S. democracy with Caribbean dictatorships in the twentieth century, revealing a set of interrelated features characterizing the transformation of colonial forms of racial and sexual control into neocolonial reconfigurations. Patterns are discernable, as a result of systemic inequality and large-scale historical events, revealing the ways in which private relations can reflect national occurrences and the intimate can be brought under public scrutiny. Acknowledging the widespread effects of racial and sexual policing that persist in current legal, economic, and political infrastructures across the circum-Caribbean can in turn bring to light permutations of resistance to the violent discriminations of the status quo. By drawing on colonial documents, such as early law systems like the 1685 French Code Noir instated in Haiti, the 1724 Code Noir in Louisiana, and the 1865 Black Code in Mississippi, in tandem with examples drawn from twentieth-century literature, Policing Intimacy humanizes the effects of legal histories and leaves space for local particularities. A focus on literary texts and the affordances enabled by the variances in form and aesthetics demonstrates the necessity of incorporating multiple stories, histories, and traumas into our accounts of the past.

A growing number of political communication and media scholars are attending to representations of American political processes and institutions in entertainment content, mostly agreeing that there is considerable democratic value in the inextricable link between politics and popular culture. Yet few of these studies have yet considered comic books and their related media as a source of “politainment.” This volume demonstrates the rich and relevant political content of comic books and their related media. From biographies to biopunk, superheroes to science-fiction, humor to horror, and articles to allohistories, comic books offer depictions of the American political arena as site of White masculinity, mired in cynicism and disaffection that is tempered by perpetual hope and optimism. Though such themes and narratives may be found in other pop culture media, comics are important because they are as often proactive as they are reactive in their political content. From the time Captain America punched Hitler in the face nine months before Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entrance into World War II, comics have not only depicted current trends but also the trajectory of those trends. This book familiarizes scholars, teachers, and students of American politics with the presidential and campaign content of comics, exhibiting how comics reflect and shape our political knowledge and attitudes. It is also written for comics studies scholars and students, offering the perspective of rhetoric and political communication to the interpretation of comics content.

This volume presents a central argument that the Pooh stories remain relevant for modern readers, opening up discourses about identity, ethics, social relations, and notions of belonging through essays that focus on geography, language, narrative, theory, and characterization. It brings together some of the most cutting-edge approaches in children’s literature theory, both from key established scholars in the field and from the currently unfolding scholarship of new researchers. Crucially, this will be the first volume to offer multiple perspectives from multiple authors on the Winnie-the-Pooh books all within a single collection.

Race in Young Adult Speculative Fiction offers a sustained, cogent analysis of race and representation in young adult speculative fiction (YASF). The collection considers how characters of color are represented in YASF, how they contribute to and participate in speculative worlds, how race affects or influences the structures of speculative worlds, and how race and racial ideologies are implicated in YASF.     The essays in the collection also consider the effects of colorblind ideology and postracialism on YASF, a genre that is often seen as progressive in its representation of adolescent protagonists. Simply put, colorblindness silences those who believe—and whose experiences demonstrate—that race and racism do continue to matter. In examining how some YASF texts normalize many of our social structures and hierarchies, this collection examines how race and racism are represented in the genre and considers how hierarchies of race are reinscribed in some texts and transgressed in others.    The essays in this collection point toward the potential of YASF to address and interrogate racial inequities in the contemporary West and beyond. They critique the texts that fall short of this possibility, and they articulate ways in which readers and critics alike might nonetheless locate diversity within narratives. This is a collection troubled by the lingering emphasis on colorblindness in YASF, but it is also the work of scholars who love the genre they critique, who celebrate its progress toward inclusivity, and who see in it an enduring future for intersectional identity.

Critics have routinely excluded African American literature from ecocritical inquiry despite the fact that the literary tradition has, from its inception, proved to be steeped in environmental concerns that address elements of the natural world and relate nature to the transatlantic slave trade, plantation labor, and nationhood. Toni Morrison’s work is no exception. Toni Morrison and the Natural World: An Ecology of Color is the first full-length ecocritical investigation of the Nobel Laureate’s novels and brings to the fore an unequaled engagement between race and nature. Morrison’s ecological consciousness holds that human geographies are enmeshed with nonhuman nature. It follows, then, that ecology, the branch of biology that studies how people relate to each other and their environment, is an apt framework for this book. The interrelationships and interactions between individuals and community, and between organisms and the biosphere are central to this analysis. They highlight that the human and nonhuman are part of a larger ecosystem of interfacings and transformations. Toni Morrison and the Natural World is organized by color, examining soil (brown) in The Bluest Eye and Paradise; plant life (green) in Song of Solomon, Beloved, and Home; bodies of water (blue) in Tar Baby and Love; and fire (orange) in Sula and God Help the Child. By providing a racially inflected reading of nature, Toni Morrison and the Natural World makes an important contribution to the field of environmental studies and provides a landmark for Morrison scholarship.

Transforming Girls: The Power of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence refocuses the history of the girls’ book and female adolescence through a comparative analysis of forgotten bestsellers aimed at adolescent girls in the United States and Germany. While these stories rely on gender binaries and suggest that girls must accommodate and support a patriarchal framework to be happy, they also provide access to imagined worlds in which teens are at the center. This is a space where mentors who trust themselves and the girl’s essentially good nature neutralize the girl’s own anxieties about maturity. These mid-nineteenth-century novels focus on female adolescence as a social category in unexpected ways. They draw not on a twentieth-century model of the alienated adolescent, but on a model of collaborative growth. Adolescence—a category that continues to engage and perplex us—is defined in these novels as a celebration of fluid identity and the deliberate construction of a self. Through insightful readings of best-selling novels, Transforming Girls explores the origins of the young adult novel, mothering as a communal enterprise, the teaching of gender identity, the girls’ book as a model for narratives of nation building, and homesickness as an antidote to nostalgia. It provides access to a forgotten group of texts that reframe our understanding of the history of the girls’ book, young adult literature, and the possibilities of adolescence. The awkward adolescent girl—so popular in mid-nineteenth-century fiction for girls—remains a valuable resource for understanding contemporary girls and stories about them.