Vale of Tears: New Essays in Religion and Reconstruction offers a window into the exciting work being done by historians, social scientists, and scholars of religious studies on the epoch of Reconstruction. A time of both peril and promise, Reconstruction in America became a cauldron of transformation and change. This collection argues that religion provided the idiom and symbol, as often the very substance, of those changes. The authors of this collection examine how African Americans and white Southerners, New England Abolitionists and former Confederate soldiers, Catholics and Protestants on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line brought their sense of the sacred into collaboration and conflict. Together, these essays mark an important new departure in a still-contested period of American history. Interdisciplinary in scope and content, it promises to challenge many of the traditional parameters of Reconstruction historiography. The range of contributors to the project, including Gaines Foster and Paul Harvey, will draw a great deal of attention from Southern historians, literary scholars, and scholars of American religion.

R. M. Hare, one of the most widely discussed of today's moral philosophers, here presents his most important essays on religion and education, in which he brings together the theoretical and the practical.

Drawing on a deep knowledge of history and human affairs, the essays pinpoint the key issues facing Christians and non-believers in determining the future of modern democratic life

Essays in Religion and Morality brings together a dozen papers of varying length to these two themes so crucial to the life and thought of William James. Reflections on the two subjects permeate, first, James's presentation of his father's Literary Remains; second, his writings on human immortality and the relation between reason and faith; third, his two memorial pieces, one on Robert Gould Shaw and the other on Emerson; fourth, his consideration of the energies and powers of human life; and last, his writings on the possibilities of peace, especially as found in his famous essay "The Moral Equivalent of War." These speeches and essays were written over a period of twenty-four years. The fact that James did not collect and publish them himself in a single volume does not reflect on their intrinsic worth or on their importance in James's philosophical work, since they include some of the best known and most influential of his writings. All the essays, throughout their varied subject matter, are consistently and characteristically Jamesian in the freshness of their attack on the problems and failings of humankind and in their steady faith in human powers.

The Body of Writing: An Erotics of Contemporary American Fiction examines four postmodern texts whose authors play with the material conventions of "the book": Joseph McElroy's Plus (1977), Carole Maso's AVA (1993), Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's DICTEE (1982), and Steve Tomasula's VAS (2003). By demonstrating how each of these works calls for an affirmative engagement with literature, Flore Chevaillier explores a centrally important issue in the criticism of contemporary fiction. Critics have claimed that experimental literature, in its disruption of conventional story-telling and language uses, resists literary and social customs. While this account is accurate, it stresses what experimental texts respond to more than what they offer. This book proposes a counter-view to this emphasis on the strictly privative character of innovative fictions by examining experimental works' positive ideas and affects, as well as readers' engagement in the formal pleasure of experimentations with image, print, sound, page, orthography, and syntax. Elaborating an erotics of recent innovative literature implies that we engage in the formal pleasure of its experimentations with signifying techniques and with the materiality of their medium. Such engagement provokes a fusion of the reader's senses and the textual material, which invites a redefinition of corporeality as a kind of textual practice.