What do we now know about the origins of plants on land, from an evolutionary and an environmental perspective? The essays in this collection present a synthesis of our present state of knowledge, integrating current information in paleobotany with physical, chemical, and geological data.

This is the first book to discuss in detail how rap music is put together musically and how it contributes to the formation of cultural identities for both artists and audiences. It also argues that current skeptical attitudes toward music analysis in popular music studies are misplaced and need to be reconsidered if cultural studies are to treat seriously the social force of rap music, popular musics, and music in general. Drawing extensively on recent scholarship in popular music studies, cultural theory, communications, critical theory, and musicology, Krims redefines 'music theory' as meaning simply 'theory about music', in which musical poetics (the study of how musical sound is deployed) may play a crucial role when its claims are contextualized and demystified. Theorizing local and global geographies of rap, Krims discusses at length the music of Ice Cube, the Goodie MoB, KRS-One, Dutch group the Spookrijders, and Canadian Cree rapper Bannock.

John D. Kerkering's study examines the literary history of racial and national identity in nineteenth-century America. Kerkering argues that writers such as DuBois, Lanier, Simms, and Scott used poetic effects to assert the distinctiveness of certain groups in a diffuse social landscape. Kerkering explores poetry's formal properties, its sound effects, as they intersect with the issues of race and nation. He shows how formal effects, ranging from meter and rhythm to alliteration and melody, provide these writers with evidence of a collective identity, whether national or racial. Through this shared reliance on formal literary effects, national and racial identities, Kerkering shows, are related elements of a single literary history. This is the story of how poetic effects helped to define national identities in Anglo-America as a step toward helping to define racial identities within the United States. This highly original study will command a wide audience of Americanists.

In seeking to bridge what is often a generation gap between lesbian feminists on the essentialist/existential side of the schism and postmodern queer theorists favoring the social construction of lesbian identity, Graber (social sciences, California State U., Fresno) critically overviews the writing of influential poet-activist- theorists Judy Grahn, Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Gloria Anzaldúa. A major concern is de-marginalizing working- class/lesbians of color in this debate. The final chapter traces the rise of queer theory circa 1991.

The author examines the "cultural and literary identity among Western Christians which the centrality of 'the Book' has helped to create, and the Christian use of the phrase 'People of the book.'"--Preface.

This new study of American poetry views the poetics of Ezra Pound and his avant-garde followers in an entirely new light. Both Romanticism and Modernism have variously been seen as revolutionary or retrograde, narcissistic or self-abnegating. This interdisciplinary work looks past distinctions between schools and styles to reveal an unexpected link between poets' spiritual aspirations, formal experiments, and political convictions. Along the way, it sheds light on the complex relationship between art and society. Beginning with a fresh reading of Emerson's elusive philosophy, the author identifies the tension between Romanticism and Liberalism as a source of Modernist poetics. Critics have dissected the eccentric forms of avant-garde American poetry but have never adequately explained its scrupulous avoidance of abstraction and elimination of the poet from the poem. Drawing extensively on classic and contemporary theory, this book reveals postwar poetics, particularly the epics Paterson and The Maximus Poems, as the fulfillment of a longstanding Romantic social vision, one which seeks to invest Liberal social structures with a transcendental core. This book is a valuable source for scholars with an interest in Emerson and Pound Studies, the intellectual traditions leading to Modernism, and the Objectivist and Black Mountain schools of American poetry.

The Limits of Identity is a polemical critique of the repudiation of universalism and the theoretical commitment to identity and difference embedded in Latin American literary and cultural studies. Through original readings of foundational Latin American thinkers (such as José Martí and José Enrique Rodó) and contemporary theorists (such as John Beverley and Doris Sommer), Charles Hatfield reveals and challenges the anti-universalism that informs seemingly disparate theoretical projects. The Limits of Identity offers a critical reexamination of widely held conceptions of culture, ideology, interpretation, and history. The repudiation of universalism, Hatfield argues, creates a set of problems that are both theoretical and political. Even though the recognition of identity and difference is normally thought to be a form of resistance, The Limits of Identity claims that, in fact, the opposite is true.