forthcoming books

• Bibler, Michael P. Cotton's Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936-1968
  (forthcoming from Virginia, Spring 2009).
  Focusing on works by Ernest J. Gaines, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, Katherine Anne Porter, Margaret Walker, William Styron, and Arna Bontemps, Bibler shows how each one uses figures of same-sex intimacy to suggest a more progressive alternative to the pervasive inequalities tied historically and symbolically to the South's most iconic institution. He looks specifically at relationships between white men of the planter class, between plantation mistresses and black maids, and between black men, arguing that while the texts portray the plantation as a rigid hierarchy of differences, these queer relations privilege a notion of sexual sameness that joins the individuals as equals.
• Schreier, Benjamin. The Power of Negative Thinking: Cynicism and the History of Modern American Literature
  (forthcoming from Virginia, Spring 2009).
  Suspicious of the equation of cynicism with quietism, nihilism, selfishness, or false consciousness, Benjamin Schreier rejects the representation of cynicism as something categorically different from the classical outlook of Diogenes. In his reading of Henry Adams's The Education of Henry Adams, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, he examines cynicism as an important and underappreciated current in modern American literature and contributes to ongoing debates about the tendency to want the analysis of texts to yield something normative. His focus is less on the cynical characters in the texts he treats and more on the strategies used to render normative narratives legitimate.
• Wong, Edlie L. Fugitive and Foreigner: Slavery, Kinship, and the Legal Culture of Travel
  (forthcoming from NYU Press, 2009).
  Wong contends that slavery and its logic of property had a profound effect on the notion of travel and freedom in the Atlantic World. British and American slaveholders traveled with the assumption that their right to free mobility extended to their enslaved servants. But slaves are rarely mentioned in travel accounts of the time that romanticized mobility as a unique expression of individual freedom and autonomy Recuperating the untold narratives of slaves who accompanied their masters on trips to free territories, Wong argues that these journeys between free and enslaved territories challenge the cultural logic of slavery and freedom and offer an alternative view of history to the already established genres of abolitionist and fugitive slave narratives. A volume in the new series Evolutions: America in the Long Nineteenth Century.