In this rich cultural history, Pamela Roberston Wojcik examines America's ambivalent and shifting attitude toward homelessness. She considers film cycles from five distinct historical moments that show characters who are unhomed and placeless, mobile rather than fixed—characters who fail, resist, or opt out of the mandate for a home of one's own. From the tramp films of the silent era to the 2021 Oscar-winning Nomadland, Wojcik reveals a tension in the American imaginary between viewing homelessness as deviant and threatening or emblematic of freedom and independence. Blending social history with insights drawn from a complex array of films, both canonical and fringe, Wojcik effectively "unhomes" dominant narratives that cast aspirations for success and social mobility as the focus of American cinema, reminding us that genres of precarity have been central to American cinema (and the American story) all along.

The first comprehensive discussion of the historical archaeology of homelessness In a time when the idea of home has become central to living the American dream, The Archaeology of the Homed and the Unhomed brings to the forefront the concept of homelessness. The book points out that homelessness remains underexplored in historical archaeology, a fact which may reflect societal biases and marginalization, and it provides the field’s first comprehensive discussion of the subject. Daniel Sayers argues that the unhomed and the home have been inherently interconnected in the real world across the past several centuries. Sayers builds a conceptual model that focuses on this dynamic and uses it to generate new insights into pre‒Civil War communities of Maroons and Indigenous Americans, Great Depression‒era hobo communities, and Midwest farmsteads. In doing so, he highlights the social complexities, ambiguities, and significance of the home and the unhomed in the archaeological record. Using a variety of data sources including documentary records and material culture and drawing on extensive fieldwork, Sayers illuminates how homelessness is created, reproduced, and disparaged by the dominant culture. The book also emphasizes the importance of applied archaeology. Through these studies, Sayers contends that activist archaeologists have a role—and responsibility—to share their knowledge to help policy makers and stakeholders understand the unhomed, homelessness, and the American experience in this area. A volume in the series the American Experience in Archaeological Perspective, edited by Michael S. Nassaney and Krysta Ryzewski

Stephen R. Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant' examines Donaldson's first three novels in an attempt to define their place in the fantasy canon. The book begins with an extensive introduction to the fantasy genre in which W.A. Senior eloquently defends fantasy against charges of being mere escapism, or simply juvenile, and not warranting serious critical consideration.

Eighth grader Penny Preston unknowingly creates a trans-dimensional rift, which causes a food fight. Instead of being suspended, she discovers that she exists in more than three dimensions; she is misaligned. In training, she learns that she is the key to preventing higher-dimensional beings from entering our universe with god-like powers. Together with her multi-dimensional cat, Penny struggles to save her relationship with her best friend, protect her universe, and uncover her connection to Celtic legend.

Asian Christian Theology provides a survey of contextually reflective, robustly evangelical theology for students to engage with the core doctrines of Christianity and their outworking in different cultures across Asia. The contributors of the chapters come from all corners of Asia to systematically examine traditional doctrinal themes and contemporary concerns for the Asian church. Ideal for use as a companion textbook in Asian seminaries and institutions, this book will also provide excellent further reading for those outside of Asia seeking global theological perspectives, and for those in contexts of significant Asian diaspora. Many excellent books surveying theology exist, but this book is a major step forward for students and scholars seeking to understand the dynamic environment of evangelical theology in Asia.

“Covenant is [Stephen R.] Donaldson's genius!”—The Village Voice He called himself Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, because he dared not believe in this strange alternate world on which he suddenly found himself. Yet the Land tempted him. He had been sick; now he seemed better than ever before. Through no fault of his own, he had been outcast, unclean, a pariah. Now he was regarded as a reincarnation of the Land's greatest hero—Berek Halfhand—armed with the mystic power of White Gold. That power alone could protect the Lords of the Land from the ancient evil of the Despiser, Lord Foul. Except that Covenant had no idea how to use that power. . . .

This bold new theoretical study explores dissident subjectivity, that is, the struggle for unique authorial identity in American literary discourse that has existed, according to David Jarraway, since the Romantics. From Emerson’s “Experience” remarking upon the “focal distance within the actual horizon of human life” to Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize address sanctifying the artist’s “sophisticated privileged space,” American literature has continuously recognized a necessary “distance”—the gap between culturally accepted ideas of selfhood and the intractable reality of the self’s never-completed construction in time. Jarraway’s fascinating examination of modernist poets shows that engaging with this artistic space, or “going the distance,” empowers writers and their readers to create and perceive identities that resist the frozen certainties of conventional gender, sexual, and social roles. Employing this theory with grace and precision, Jarraway ranges through the dissident process in Gertrude Stein, the cultural criticism of William Carlos Williams, the deferred racialism of Langston Hughes, the queer perversities of Frank O’Hara, and the spectral lesbian poetics of Elizabeth Bishop. Bolstered further by insights from the pragmatism of William James through the cultural critique of Theodor Adorno to the queer theory of Judith Butler, the author challenges his audience with politically engaged insistence on the life-affirming potentialities of human subjectivity in literature. His passionate conclusion demonstrates the liberating fluidity of self made possible by feminist chartings of modern identity’s depths. Lucidly composed, theoretically sophisticated and up-to-the-minute, Going the Distance painstakingly recovers the dissident American subjective in modernist literary discourse within its fullest cultural context. Jarraway’s readings are a major contribution to poetry scholarship and to cultural studies that will provoke further investigations into the history of subjectivity in American literature as a whole.