Bøger udgivet af Lehigh University Press

This book explores the Erie Railway's contributions to nineteenth-century visual culture by promoting scenic thinking in which closely viewed scenes and deep prospects became the basis for engaging landscapes and their representations. Erie guides became commentary on landscape, with images and texts as annotations on the production of culture.

The book is a tool designed to aid scholars in their efforts to elucidate Gil Vicente's works and, at the same time, will prove useful for students who embark on a voyage into the world created by this dramatist.

This study investigates interpretation of a late-fourteenth-century fictional character in both verbal and visual art of the period 1660-1810. Audiovisual analysis and diachronic afterlife studies intertwine concerning the Wife of Bath in songs, scholarship, commentary, poetic paraphrases, musical theater in London and on the Continent, paintings, and book illustrations.

During the eighteenth century, the three tribes of the Delaware Indians underwent dramatic transformation as they migrated westward across the Allegheny mountain. Combining native oral traditions, ethnology, and colonial history Grimes tells a compelling story of the Delaware Indian nation; their emergence, triumphs, tribulations, and tragic fall.

The first ever study of illustrated belles lettres publishing in eighteenth-century Scotland, the book examines the strategies underpinning the making and the marketing of illustrated books. At the same time, it sheds light on those individuals (artists, engravers, bookseller-publishers) that were involved in the production of these works.

This book presents Austen as a novelist who put her distinctive voice and extraordinary imagination to the service of poets and philosophers. The study explores Austen's account of liberty understood as self-governance and suggests interior liberty as the necessary prerequisite for political liberty.

In this book the author reveals a tapestry woven by Christopher Tolkien from different portions of his father's work that is often quite mind-boggling, with inserts that seemed initially to have been editorial inventions shown to have come from some other remote portion of Tolkien's vast body of work.

H.P. Lovecraft, one of the twentieth century's most important writers in the genre of horror fiction, famously referred to Edgar Allan Poe as both his ';model' and his ';God of Fiction.' While scholars and readers of Poe's and Lovecraft's work have long recognized the connection between these authors, this collection of essays is the first in-depth study to explore the complex literary relationship between Lovecraft and Poe from a variety of critical perspectives. Of the thirteen essays included in this book, some consider how Poe's work influenced Lovecraft in important ways. Other essays explore how Lovecraft's fictional, critical, and poetic reception of Poe irrevocably changed how Poe's work has been understood by subsequent generations of readers and interpreters. Addressing a variety of topics ranging from the psychology of influence to racial and sexual politics, the essays in this book also consider how Lovecraft's interpretations of Poe have informed later adaptations of both writers' works in films by Roger Corman and fiction by Stephen King, Thomas Ligotti, and Caitlin R. Kiernan. This collection is an indispensable resource not only for those who are interested in Poe's and Lovecraft's work specifically, but also for readers who wish to learn more about the modern history and evolution of Gothic, horror, and weird fiction.

This book offers a unique firsthand account of the experiences of a teenage officer in America's Civil War. Second Lieutenant Thomas James Howell was only seventeen years old when he received his commission to serve the 3rd New Jersey Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Featuring sixty-five letters that Howell wrote home to his family, this book describes soldier life in the Army of the Potomac during the spring and summer of 1862, focusing on Howell's experiences during Major General George B. McClellan's Peninsula Campaign. Howell's letters tell the story of a young man coming of age in the army. He wrote to his mother and siblings about the particular challenges he faced in seeking to earn the respect of both the men he commanded and his superiors. Unfortunately, however, the young lieutenant's life was cut short in his very first combat experience when he was struck in the abdomen by a cannonball and nearly torn in two during the Battle of Gaines' Mill. This book records Howell's tragic story, and it traces his distinctive perception of the Civil War as a vehicle enabling him to transition into manhood and to prove his masculinity.

The Steelworkers Retirement Security System: A Worker-based Model for Community Investment articulates a new model for economic security based upon steelworkers' pension provisions and labor politics after World War II. Labor's collective bargaining agreements created interdependent commitments that sustained jobs and stabilized communities. The evidence in The Steelworkers Retirement Security System includes an empirical analysis of United States steel towns and case studies of Weirton, West Virginia, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and Johnstown, Pennsylvania. By understanding the politics that bound firms and workers together and adapting these commitments to the post-industrial economy, The Steelworkers Retirement Security System offers a new means by which communities can provide workers security and economic growth. This new model, the Guaranteed Pension and Community Investment plan, provide workers with lifetime retirement annuities and communities with reliable investment capital.

Africa: What It Gave Me, What It Took from Me is a memoir of an extraordinary woman who, as a newlywed, travelled with her husband to German South West Africa, a colony situated just above South African on the Atlantic coast. Here they begin a farm in a quite remote area where they raise cattle, sheep, and goats and plant large gardens on the banks of the Omaruru River. They build a comfortable home and welcome their first child. As the von Eckenbrechers work hard to build, their farm natives, whose land has been appropriated by the colonial government, are planning a revolt against colonial rule. Insurrection begins and the von Eckenbrechers are in the midst of it all. As the rebellion strengthens, Frau von Eckenbrecher returns to Germany to wait out the insurrection. Her husband eventually returns as well. Frau von Eckenbrecher never feels completely at home again in Germany. The von Eckenbrechers divorce and Frau von Eckenbrecher returns to South West Africa with her two sons. Her former husband emigrates to Paraguay. Frau von Eckenbrecher eventually takes a position in a German language school in Windhoek, the capital city, and rears her two sons there. In her book she chronicles colonial life, the natives of the colony, how the Spanish Influenza pandemic raged in Namibia, World War I in Africa, German surrender, and the South African occupation of German South West Africa and the eventual ceding of the colony to South Africa. The editors bring the memoir to a close with an update of Frau von Eckenbrecher's later life and death, and a short remembrance from one of her two grandsons.

This book offers a consciously eclectic approach to the rich history of Pennsylvania in the period from 1740 to 1950. Combining original research with syntheses of relevant work by other historians, Pennsylvania Histories seeks to appeal to both professional historians and general readers by presenting a range of significant individuals, groups, and events that are likely to be less familiar to audiences interested in the history of Pennsylvania. The Moravians, for example, emerge as a denomination whose involvement in proselytization activities sets them apart from the quietism of the Amish and other well-known sects. Although the book concentrates on Pennsylvania, the subject matter is also germane to wider issues in the areas of economics, race and ethnicity, religion, and gender studies. Among the many topics discussed, Pennsylvania Histories considers the French and British refugees who settled near the Susquehanna River during the late eighteenth century, the burning of the town of Chambersburg by Confederate raiders in 1864, and the semi-public executions in Pennsylvania towns that persisted into the early twentieth century.

This book examines the memoir of Toussaint Louverturea former slave, general in the French army, and leader of the Haitian Revolutionand the memoir of his son, Isaac. The Revolution and its leaders have been studied and written about extensively. Until recently (2004), however, the memoir of Toussaint has received little attentionand only as a historical document. This is the first study that explores the 1802 work foremost as a literary text, a creative production that deploys the techniques of fiction and drama to make truth claims about the past; moreover, this is the first book-length study of Isaac Louverture's memoir. The two texts are read as examples of how black men thought of themselves as ';men' (citizens) and, therefore, how they expressed their masculinity, at that historical moment, as experiences of mourning and loss. This study builds upon three areas of scholarship: the tradition of memoir writing; historicist readings of Toussaint's memoir; and descriptions and theories of men and masculinity within the black Atlantic.The study distinguishes itself in ways that will make it of interest to more than just historians: in addition to using the intersection of race and masculinity as an analytical tool, it speaks to the nature of literary creativity and it draws from studies examining the relationship between history, memory, and fiction. As a result, scholars and students in literary and cultural criticism, as well as those in gender and diasporic studies, will also find this study of interest and value.

The AnnotatedWe represents the first fully annotated translation of Evgeny Zamiatin's classic novel in English. Generally recognized as the first modern anti-utopian novel, Zamiatin's We has puzzled scholars and critics alike, for it is both serious and playful, full of games. Long considered to be enigmatic, it stands out as unique among his works, and its importance is beyond doubt, for it not only holds the distinction of being the first work of its kind, but is also widely believed to have provided thematic elements for the two most famous dystopian works of the twentieth century, Aldous Huxleys Brave New World and George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four. This new English translation employs language and syntax that mirror the precision and economy of Zamiatin's Russian in his ';poem in prose.' The commentary that accompanies the text sheds light on Zamiatin's use of language as well as on the broad array of allusions that mark it, while at the same time suggesting many previously unacknowledged sources for the novel's playfulness.

Christian mystic, astrologer, and spiritualist, Charles Carleton Massey (18381905) underwent an eclectic spiritual journey that resulted in a series of articles, letters, and booklets that have largely been neglected by modern society. Massey was a child of privilege formally trained as a barrister of law at the Westminster School and the son of the English Minister of Finance for India. He devoted his life to solving the metaphysical mysteries of existence leading him into the world of religious philosophy that placed him in the middle of a crossroads between Victorian science, religion, and philosophy. Beginning his journey as a Spiritualist, Massey continued on a course that brought him into the Theosophical Society, eventually becoming the founding president of its British branch, going through the ranks of the Society of Psychical Research and ultimately into his final role as a Christian mystic. This indispensable work combines Massey's collected writings with never before published letters organized topically in order to define Massey's unique world-view for a new generation of readers. This book covers a range of topics from the ';nature of God' to the ';microcosm and macrocosm' to ';Satanism' and ';reincarnation' all the while allowing the reader a rare glimpse into Victorian England and the social and religious issues of this time period. The recollections recorded in this book though written over a hundred years ago, are dealt with in such a simple yet profound way that remain relevant to modern spiritual seekers of all types.

Readers of Old English would generally agree that the poem Genesis B, a translation into Old English of an Old Saxon (that is, continental) retelling of the story of the Fall, is a vigorous and moving narrative. They would disagree, however, as to the meaning of the poem. Some hold that it reflects an orthodox Christian viewpoint and others claim that it assumes a distinctly unorthodox position in portraying Adam and Eve as not morally culpable in their disobedience but merely tricked into disobedience through the wiles of the Devils agent. The study Genesis B and the Comedic Imperative, examining these incompatible readings, infers that the poem is essentially orthodox, that it demonstrates sufficiently the moral culpability of Adam and Eve, and that it departs from orthodoxy only insofar as it conveys a strong impression that Adam and Even will undertake what amounts to Christian penance, leading them eventually to Heaven. The poem thereby attains the happy ending typical of early medieval Christian narrative. Hence the titular Comedic Imperative.The inference of orthodoxy follows as a nigh-inevitable conclusion of the interpretation of several motifs: the poems culturally imbued martiality, its allegorical bent, and also what A. N. Doane noted as its tropological bent. The argument depends heavily upon philological inquiry and on examination of prevailing beliefs and attitudes of contemporaneous Frankish society, religious and civil, leading to the reinterpretation of crucial passages. Of these, most notably, is the passage in which Adam, in refusing the Tempters invitation to eat the fruit, observes that the Tempter has given no tacen ';sign' as evidence that he truly is God's emissary. Other passages that have impeded critical perception of the poems significance are also examined, such as the notorious micel wundor clause (lines 595-98) and the pseudo-gnomic declaration swa hire eaforan sculon after lybban (623-35). In sum, Genesis B sustains the orthodoxy otherwise of the Junius 11 manuscript.

Examining the anthracite coal trades emergence and legacy in the five counties that constituted the core of the industry, the authors explain the split in the modes of production between entrepreneurial production and corporate production and the consequences of each for the two major anthracite regions. This book argues that the initial conditions in which the anthracite industry developed led to differences in the way workers organized and protested working conditions and the way in which the two regions were affected by the decline of the industry and two subsequent waves of deindustrialization.The authors examine the bourgeois class formation in the coal regions and its consequences for differential regional growth and urbanization. This is given context through their investigation of class conflict in the region and the struggle of workers to build a stable union that would represent their interests, as well as the struggles within the union that finally emerged as the dominant force (the United Mine Workers of American) between conservative business unionists and progressive forces.Lastly, the authors explore the demise of anthracite as the dominant industry, the attempt to attract replacement industries, the subsequent two waves of deindustrialization in the region, and the current economic conditions that prevail in the former coal counties and the cities in them. This book includes a discussion of local politics and the emergence of a strong labor-Democratic tie in the northern anthracite region and a weaker tie between labor and the Democratic party in the central and southern fields.

Relying primarily on a narrative, chronological approach, this study examines Ku Klux Klan activities in Pennsylvania's twenty-five western-most counties, where the state organization enjoyed greatest numerical strength. The work covers the period between the Klan's initial appearance in the state in 1921 and its virtual disappearance by 1928, particularly the heyday of the Invisible Empire, 19231925. This book examines a wide variety of KKK activities, but devotes special attention to the two large and deadly Klan riots in Carnegie and Lilly, as well as vigilantism associated with the intolerant order. Klansmen were drawn from a pool of ordinary Pennsylvanians who were driven, in part, by the search for fraternity, excitement, and civic betterment. However, their actions were also motivated by sinister, darker emotions and purposes. Disdainful of the rule of law, the Klan sought disorder and mayhem in pursuit of a racist, nativist, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish agenda.

, Mysticism in Postmodernist Long Poems borrows insights from Religious Studies and critical theory to examine the role of spirituality in contemporary poetry, specifically the genre of the long poem. Descending from Whitman's Song of Myself, the long poem is often considered the American twentieth-century equivalent of the epic poem, but unlike the epic, it carries few generic expectations aside from the fact that it simply must be long. This makes the form particularly pliable as a tool for spiritual inquiry. The period following World War II is often described as a secular age, but spirituality continued as a concern for poets, as evidenced by this study. These writers look beyond conventional faith systems and instead seek individual paths of understanding; they engage in mysticism, in other words. With chapters on H.D. and Brenda Hillman, Robert Duncan, James Merrill, Charles Wright, and Galway Kinnell and Gary Snyder, this study demonstrates how these poets engage the culture of consumption in the postwar years at the same time they search for opportunities for transcendence. Not content to throw over the earthly in favor of the otherworldly, these poets reject the familiar binary of the worldly and metaphysical to produce distinctive paths of spiritual understanding that fuel what Wright calls a ';contemplation of the divine.'

Piano Makers in Russia in the Nineteenth Century is a richly detailed thematic study of the history of the piano in Russian society from its beginnings with the European artisans who settled in St. Petersburg in the early decades of the century through the transition to Russian-owned family firms. The piano played a defining role in the shaping of Russia's musical culture in the nineteenth century, as artisans and entrepreneurs provided the foundation for the great tradition of the Russian virtuoso in the performance and the composition of piano music. It also helped bring about a transformative change in the material culture as the piano expanded its reach from the court and the nobility to include music enthusiasts from all social classes and Russian families in their homes. This historical study brings to light the impact of neglected piano artisans in nineteenth-century Russia, and presents a fresh view of the social and economic ties between the state and the piano-manufacturing artisans in an era largely defined by handcrafting and entrepreneurship. It contributes significantly to current issues surrounding the role of the piano and the entrepreneur-artisans in the urban centers of imperial Russia and represents an expansion of what is currently known about the piano builders who established workshops in Russia beginning in the late 1830s and 1840s, well before the heyday of the virtuoso in that country. Rare documents, including letters, memoirs, gazettes, exhibition catalogs, music journals, and administrative reports, form the nucleus of this book and provide fascinating insights about state and private patronage and the class/economic issues related to the affordability and prestige of the piano in Russia. Issues surrounding the transformation of the music industry in Russia, the role of women as patrons and performers, the exportation of instruments to the Russian Far East, and the complex system of tariffs and trade protection that benefited domestic piano manufacturers provide this book's thematic links. Conclusions indicate that while favorable tariff laws and state-imposed economic policies benefited the family-owned firms in the nineteenth century, they remained in effect in the decades after the nationalization of the piano industry in 1917.

In this book, author Lucas Murrey argues that the thinking of the modern German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (19441900) is not only more grounded in antiquity than previously understood, but is also based on the Dionysian spirit of Greece which scholars have still to confront. This book demonstrates that Nietzsche's philosophy is unique within Western thought as it retrieves the politics of a Dionysiac model and language to challenge the alienation of humans from nature and one another.Murrey develops here a new picture of Greece, reminding readers how money emerged and rapidly developed in Greece during the sixth century B.C.E. The event of monetization created the new art form of tragedy: money-tyrants struggling against the forces of earth and communities who consequently suffered isolation, blindness, and death. As Murrey points out, Nietzsche (unconsciously) retrieves the battle among money, nature, and community and adapts its lessons to our time. Additionally, Nietzsche's philosophy not only adapts the wisdom of Dionysus to question the unlimited ';glow and fuel' of a ';ponderous herd' of money-tyrants today, but it also draws attention to Greece's warnings about the lethal danger of the eyes in myth, cult, and theatre.This work introduces a much needed vision of Nietzschean thought, and it emphasizes the relevance of an interdisciplinary approach combining philosophy with literary studies and psychology with religious and visual/media studies. When applied to our present circumstance, the approach of this book reveals how a dangerous visual culture, through its support of the limitlessness of money, is harming our relationship with nature and each other.

America's First Chaplain is a biography of the life of Philadelphia's Jacob Duche, the Anglican minister who offered the most famous prayer and wrote one of the most infamous letters of the American Revolution. For the prayer to open the First Continental Congress, Duche was declared a national hero and named the first chaplain to the newly independent American Congress. For the letter written to George Washington imploring the general to encourage Congress to rescind independence, he was accused of high treason and sent into exile. As a result of this apparently irreconcilable contradiction in the minister's behavior, many of his contemporaries and most historians have assumed he was weak, that in the moment of crisis his imprisonment by British authorities during their occupation of Philadelphia - he cut a deal with the British for his own safety. The evidence gathered from the life of Jacob Duche, however, points to a very different conclusion, one that reveals the immense complexity of the American Revolution and the havoc it wreaked on the lives of the people who experienced it. The story of this deeply religious rector of Christ Church and St. Peter's reveals the human side of the Revolution, a story that includes great accomplishment and great tragedy. It also provides insight into the complicated nature of Pennsylvania's ';democratic' revolution, the unique difficulties faced by Anglican leaders during the revolution, and the weakness of simplistic categorizations such as patriot or loyalist. For more than two centuries two events a prayer and a letter - have obscured our view of the extraordinary life lying in the background. This biography attempts to reinterpret the prayer and the letter in light of the man behind them and in the process to uncover the real significance of both as well as to gain a glimpse into the complexity and contradictions of the American Revolution.

In the summer of 1813, as war with Britain intensified, President James Madison secretly dispatched an envoy to the Regency government of Spain with the urgent goal of thwarting a feared British bid to use Spanish Florida as a base from which to attack the United States, and with the further hope of acquiring that territory for America. The man Madison sent to pursue those challenging tasks was Anthony Morris, a friend of Dolley's from their youth in Philadelphia and a devout Quaker lawyer who had never before journeyed abroad. Morris, a widower, had willingly accepted the president's call, despite the separation it would impose from his four teenage children.The Morris mission did not proceed as intended, as developments in Spain conspired to alter its scope and prolong its duration. Long after the war had ended, Morris was compelled to persevere at his post as the only American link to an unfriendly Spanish monarchy. As he dutifully carried on, ill-founded accusations by two other frustrated American diplomats slurred his reputation. Meanwhile, he thirsted to rejoin his maturing children, whose lives were taking paths that would have been unlikely had he never left them. Throughout this ordeal, a steadfastly philosophical Anthony Morris strove to counter his distress by thoughtful exploration of a national culture and a religious faith so very different from his own. The full story of this distinctive but little-remembered diplomatic endeavor has not previously been recounted. The telling of it here reveals much about the vexation and confusion endemic to American diplomacy in the age of sail, when events often moved faster than the mails. Interwoven with that historical account is the poignant revelation of the spiritual and cultural growth that Anthony Morris reaped from his odyssey, as displayed in a stream of intimate, charming letters to the daughters he had left at home. Published in the ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy Series

Pablo Adalberto Ortiz Quiones (19142002) was one of the most gifted writers in Ecuador and all of Latin America. Yet outside of Ecuador and amongst Afro-Hispanic literature scholars in the United States, little critical attention has been given to this pioneer whose multi-genre contributions spanned decades. In his writings, Ortiz explores some of the defining social issues in the Americas since the African and European encounters with the New World, including the notion of ';race.' He articulates a complex process of affirming the ethnic while not denying the national. Consequently, miscegenationa biological processas well as acculturation are motifs in his writings, which explore the essence of what it means to be Ecuadorian. Ortiz does not dwell upon the so-called ';race' question, the issue that causes such anxiety and hostility, overtly and covertly, in the United States. Rather, he explores, in depth, ethnicity, class, and caste in his earlier writings and evolves into an international writer while maintaining a strong black awareness. Adalberto Ortiz's transcendence of victimization to a broader view of the world is indicative of the title of Marvin A. Lewis' analysis from margin to centerand reflective of the approach taken by many Afro-Hispanic writers. The dialectical nature of Ortiz's writings makes his work particularly interesting and rewarding, as revealed in Adalberto Ortiz: From Margin to Center.In this book, Lewis examines the form and content relationships between works published during different literary periods and movements. Emphasis is placed on Ortiz's transition from the local to the international in each genre, and the theoretical approach is ';eclectic,' depending upon the exigencies of the texts. Ecocriticism, post-colonialism, post-modernism, and other methodologies addressing the environment, place/displacement, identity, and historiographic metafiction are fundamental to the Lewis' readings of Ortiz's prose and poetry.

John Updike's Early Years reveals for the first time the young Updike's developing personality and precocious creativity. Relying upon interviews with classmates and friends, and offering extensive connections to his mature work, De Bellis shows how his school years incubated his mature work.

Sir John Hill (17141775) was one of Georgian England's most vilified men despite having contributed prolifically to its medicine, science and literature. Born into a humble Northamptonshire family, the son of an impecunious God-faring Anglican minister, he started out as an apothecary, went on to collect natural objects for the great Whig lords and became a botanist of distinction. But his scandalous behavior prevented his election to the Royal Society and entry to all other professions for which he was qualified. Today, we can understand his actions as the result of a personality disorder; then he was understood entirely in moral terms. When he saw the dye cast he turned to journalism and publication, and strove maniacally to succeed without patronage. As a writer he was also cut down in ferocious ';paper wars'. Yet by the time he died, he had been knighted by the Swedish monarch and become a household name among scientists and writers throughout Britain and Europe. His life was a series of paradoxes without coherence, perhaps because he was above all a provocateur.In time he would also become a filter for the century in which he lived: its personalitiesgreat and smallas well as the broad canvas of its culture, and for this reason any biography necessarily stretches beyond the man himself to those whose profiles he also illuminates.

Theatre in Dublin,17451820: A Calendar of Performances is the first comprehensive, daily compendium of more than 18,000 performances that took place in Dublin's many professional theatres, music halls, pleasure gardens, and circus amphitheatres between Thomas Sheridan's becoming the manager at Smock Alley Theatre in 1745 and the dissolution of the Crow Street Theatre in 1820. The daily performance calendar for each of the seventy-five seasons recorded here records and organizes all surviving documentary evidence pertinent to each evening's entertainments, derived from all known sources, but especially from playbills and newspaper advertisements. Each theatre's daily entry includes all preludes, mainpieces, interludes, and afterpieces with casts and assigned roles, followed by singing and singers, dancing and dancers, and specialty entertainments. Financial data, program changes, rehearsal notices, authorship and premiere information are included in each component's entry, as is the text of contemporary correspondence and editorial contextualization and commentary, followed by other additional commentary, such as the many hundreds of printed puffs, notices, and performance reviews. In the cases of the programs of music halls, pleasure gardens, and circuses, the playbills have generally been transcribed verbatim.The calendar for each season is preceded by an analytical headnote that presents several categories of information including, among other things, an alphabetical listing of all members of each company, whether actors, musicians, specialty artists, or house servants, who are known to have been employed at each venue. Limited biographical commentary is included, particularly about performers of Irish origin, who had significant stage careers but who did not perform in London. Each headnote presents the seasons's offerings of entertainments of each theatrical type (prelude, mainpiece, interlude, afterpiece) analyzed according to genre, including a list of the number of plays in each genre and according to period in which they were first performed. The headnote also notes the number of different plays by Shakespeare staged during each season and gives particular attention to entertainments of ';special Irish interest.' The various kinds of benefit performance and command performances are also noted. Finally, this Calendar of Performances contains an appendix that furnishes a season-by-season listing of the plays that were new to the London patent theatres, and, later, of the important ';minors.' This information is provided in order for us to understand the interrelatedness of the London and Dublin repertories.

Queer Retrosexualities: The Politics of ReparativeReturn examines the retrospective logic that informs contemporary queer thinking; specifically the narrative return to the 1950s in post-1990s queer and LGBT culture in the United States. The term ';Queer Retrosexuality' marks the intersection between retrospective thinking and queernessto illustrate not only how to ';queer' retrospection, but also how retrospection, in some senses can be thought of as always already queer. This book examines the historical possibilities that inform the narrative return to the 1950s in queer cultural and literary productions such as Samuel Delany's The Motion of Light in Water, Todd Haynes's Far from Heaven, Sarah Schulman's Shimmer, and Mark Merlis's American Studiesall texts that return to a traumatic past marked by shame, exile, and persecution. Queer Retrosexualities inquires into what motivates the return in these texts to a historical moment informed by the bruises and wounds of history; but more importantly, it poses the question of how such a turn backwards could be theorized as reparative or even hopeful. This book shows how the framework of queer retrospection offers new ways of understanding history and culture, of reformulating disciplines and institutions, and of rethinking traditional modes of political activism and knowledge production. Even while it seems counterproductive to return to a historical moment that is marked by the persecution of sexual and racial minorities, the book examines how a shared feeling of relationality and community produced by the exile of shame shapes the political value of queer retrosexualities. The retrospective return to the 1950s allows queer thinking to move away from the commodification of queer culture in the present that masquerades as progress. Thus, the book theorizes how traumatic history becomes a valuable resource for the political project of assembling collective memory as the base materials for imagining a differentand more queerfuture.