The Wayward Pilgrim is an account of the desultory pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain made by a professor of Spanish on Sabbatical leave from the Salisbury University in Maryland. The professor undertakes the pilgrimage not as a religious experience but as an attempt to better understand the history and culture of Spain. In the book, he combines an account of the Medieval pilgrimage with the diversions often taken by the modem pilgrim. In the end, the professor comes to realize the hardships, the endurance and the hardy and devote spirit of the true pilgrim. In addition to the account of the pilgrimage, the book also contains vignettes of great moments and great historical figures that changed the world forever.

"I apologize again for my boldness, but I must tell you that you're the most beautiful girl in Oxford. Maybe in all of England. I have to put you in my painting." With these words, the scandalous, wildly talented painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti changes seventeen-year-old Jane Burden's life forever. Jane's gaunt, awkward figure and grave expression have cemented her reputation as the ugliest girl in Oxford. Raised by a stableman on Holywell Street -- the town's most sordid and despicable slum -- Jane is nearly resigned to marry in-kind. But when she meets Rossetti at the theater, he sees beyond her worn, ill-fitting dress and unruly hair and is stirred by her unconventional beauty. The charismatic painter whisks Jane into Oxford's exclusive art scene as his muse, and during the long and intimate hours of modeling -- draping and tilting, gazing and posing -- Jane finds herself falling in love. When Rossetti abruptly leaves Oxford with no plans to return, brokenhearted Jane settles for a stable, if passionless, marriage to his soft-spoken protégé, William Morris -- the man who would go on to become the father of the British Arts and Crafts Movement. Jane resigns herself to life as a respectable wife and mother, exchanging the slop bucket for intricate needlepoint, willing away the memories of Rossetti and what could have been. But Rossetti and Jane are inextricably bound together by tragedy, art, and desire, and no amount of time or distance can separate them. Ultimately this complicated arrangement with which Jane, Morris, and Rossetti must learn to live threatens to undo them all. Richly textured and deftly portrayed, Elizabeth Hickey's latest is a compelling portrait of the ever-changing notions of both love and beauty.

Research on pilgrimage has traditionally fallen across a series of academic disciplines - anthropology, archaeology, art history, geography, history and theology. To date, relatively little work has been devoted to the issue of pilgrimage as writing and specifically as a form of travel-writing. The aim of the interdisciplinary essays gathered here is to examine the relations of Christian pilgrimage to the numerous narratives, which it generates and upon which it depends. Authors reveal not only the tensions between oral and written accounts but also the frequent ambiguities of journeys - the possibilities of shifts between secular and sacred forms and accounts of travel. Above all, the papers reveal the self-generating and multiple-authored characteristics of pilgrimage narrative: stories of past pilgrimage experience generate future stories and even future journeys. Simon Coleman moved to Sussex University in 2004, having spent 11 years at Durham University as Lecturer and then Reader in Anthropology, and Deputy Dean for the Faculty of Social Sciences and Health. John Elsner is Senior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

More than one million people from all walks of life have been uplifted and entertained by Heaven Bound, the folk drama that follows, through song and verse, the struggles between Satan and a band of pilgrims on their way down the path of glory that leads to the golden gates. Staged annually and without interruption for more than seventy years at Big Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Atlanta, Heaven Bound is perhaps the longest running black theater production. Here, a lifelong member of Big Bethel with many close ties to Heaven Bound recounts its lively history and conveys the enduring power and appeal of an Atlanta tradition that is as much a part of the city as Coca-Cola or Gone with the Wind.

Americans' first attempts to forge a national identity coincided with the apparent need to define--and limit--the status and rights of Native Americans. During these early decades of the nineteenth century, the image of the "Indian" circulated throughout popular culture--in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, plays about Pocahontas, Indian captivity narratives, Black Hawk's autobiography, and visitors' guides to the national capitol. In exploring such sources as well as the political and legal rhetoric of the time, Susan Scheckel argues that the "Indian question" was intertwined with the ways in which Americans viewed their nation's past and envisioned its destiny. She shows how the Indians provided a crucial site of reflection upon national identity. And yet the Indians, by being denied the natural rights upon which the constitutional principles of the United States rested, also challenged American convictions of moral ascendancy and national legitimacy. Scheckel investigates, for example, the Supreme Court's decision on Indian land rights and James Fenimore Cooper's popular frontier romance The Pioneers: both attempted to legitimate American claims to land once owned by Indians and to assuage guilt associated with the violence of conquest by incorporating the Indians in a version of the American political "family." Alternatively, the widely performed Pocahontas plays dealt with the necessity of excluding Indians politically, but also portrayed these original inhabitants as embodying the potential of the continent itself. Such examples illustrate a gap between principles and practice. It is from this gap, according to the author, that the nation emerged, not as a coherent idea or a realist narrative, but as an ongoing performance that continues to play out, without resolution, fundamental ambivalences of American national identity.