Elise Waerenskjold is known to fans of Texas women writers as "the lady with the pen," from the title of a book of her writings. writings.  A forward-looking journalist, she sent letters and articles back to Norway that encouraged others to follow her footsteps to Texas, where a small colony of Norwegian settlers were making a new life alongside—but distinct from—other European immigrants. Undaunted is the first full biography of Waerenskjold during her Texas years, a life story that shows much about Texas, especially in the Norwegian colonies, from 1847 until near the end of the century. Moreover, it tells the story of a strong and independent thinker who championed women's rights, was pro-Union and against slavery (though her husband was in the Confederate army and was subsequently murdered in Reconstruction-era violence), and left an intriguing body of writing about life on the edges of Texas settlement. Charles Russell's vivid account of Waerenskjold describes not only her influence among her countrymen but also her own life, which was a saga of considerable drama itself. It offers a clear and entertaining window onto immigrant life in Texas and the issues that shaped women's lives and elicited their talents in an earlier century.

A leading proponent of racial equality in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century, Albion W. Tourgée (1838–1905) served as the most articulate spokesman of the radical wing of the Republican party, and he continued to advocate for its egalitarian ideals long after Reconstruction ended. Undaunted Radical presents Tourgée’s most significant letters, speeches, and essays from the commencement of Radical Reconstruction through the bleak days of the era of Jim Crow. An Ohioan by birth, Tourgée served in the Union army and afterwards moved to North Carolina, where he helped draft the 1868 state constitution. Within that and other documents he proposed free public education, the abolition of whipping posts, the end of property qualifications for jury duty and office holding, and the initiation of judicial reform and uniform taxation. Tourgée also served as a Republican-installed superior court judge, a position that brought him into increasing conflict with the Ku Klux Klan. In 1879, he published A Fool’s Errand, a bestselling novel based on his Reconstruction experiences. Although now often overlooked, Tourgée in his lifetime offered a prominent voice of reason amid the segregation, disenfranchisement, lynching, racial propaganda, and mythologies about African Americans that haunted Reconstruction-era society and Gilded Age politics. These thirty-four documents elaborate the reformer’s opinions on the Reconstruction Amendments, his generation’s racial and economic theories, the cultural politics of North-South reconciliation, the ethics of corporate capitalism, the Social Gospel movement, and the philosophical underpinnings of American democratic citizenship. Mark Elliott and John David Smith, among the foremost authorities on Tourgée, have brought these writings, including the previously unpublished oral arguments Tourgée delivered before the U.S. Supreme Court as Homer Plessy’s lead attorney in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), together in one volume. The book also includes an introductory overview of Tourgée’s life and an exhaustive bibliography of Tourgée’s writings and related works, providing an essential collection for anyone studying Reconstruction and the early civil rights movement.

The first book to interleave Minnie Vautrin's diary on the Rape of Nanking with that of her Chinese assistant Tsen Shui-fang from December 8, 1937 to March 1, 1938 day by day. In addition to over 160 annotations by the editors, the volume contains biographical sketches of the women, a note on the two diaries, a chapter on the aftermath of the Rape, two lengthy reports on the Rape of Nanking from Vautrin's correspondence in the Appendix and a selected bibliography.

Under an Imperial Sun examines literary, linguistic, and cultural representations of Japan's colonial South (nanpô). Building on the most recent scholarship from Japan, Taiwan, and the West, it takes a cross-cultural, multidisciplinary, comparative approach that considers the views of both colonizer and colonized as expressed in travel accounts and popular writing as well as scholarly treatments of the area's cultures and customs. Readers are introduced to the work of Japanese writers Hayashi Fumiko and Nakajima Atsushi, who spent time in the colonial South, and expatriate Nishikawa Mitsuru, who was raised and educated in Taiwan and tried to capture the essence of Taiwanese culture in his fictional and ethnographic writing. The effects of colonial language policy on the multilingual environment of Taiwan are discussed, as well as the role of language as a tool of imperialism and as a vehicle through which Japan's southern subjects expressed their identity--one that bridged Taiwanese and Japanese views of self. Struggling with these often conflicting views, Taiwanese authors, including the Nativists Yang Kui and Lü Heruo and Imperial Subject writers Zhou Jinpo and Chen Huoquan, expressed personal and societal differences in their writing. This volume looks closely at their lives and works and considers the reception of this literature--the Japanese language literature of Japan's colonies--both in Japan and in the former colonies. Finally, it asks: What do these works tell us about the specific example of cultural hybridity that arose in Japanese-occupied Taiwan and what relevance does this have to the global phenomenon of cultural hybridity viewed through a postcolonial lens?

Elsa Morante has long been recognized internationally as one of the most significant and innovative writers of twentieth-century Italy; nonetheless, there has to date been no full-length study in English dedicated to her work. This collection of twelve essays offers the first comprehensive evaluation of Morante to appear outside Italy, while taking into account modern critical and theoretical developments.

Few composition scholars two decades ago would have imagined the rate at which their field is now developing, expanding beyond its boundaries, creating new alliances, and locating new sites for research and generation of knowledge. In their introduction to this volume, Farris and Anson argue that, faced with a welter of competing models, compositionists too quickly dichotomize and dismiss. The contributors to Under Construction, therefore, address themselves to the need for commerce among competing visions of the field. They represent diverse settings and distinct points of view, but their over-riding interest is in promoting a view of the field that values interaction and mutual development above dogmatics and isolation.

Since the late 1960s, the lives of south Koreans have been reconstructed on the shifting ground of urbanization, industrialization, military authoritarianism, democratic reform, and social liberalization. Class and gender identities have been modified in relation to a changing modernity and new definitions of home and family, work and leisure, husband and wife. Under Construction provides an illuminating portrait of south Koreans in the 1990s--a decade that saw a return to civilian rule, a loosening of censorship and social control, and the emergence of a full-blown consumer culture. It shows how these changes impacted the lives of Korean men and women and the very definition of what it means to be "male" and "female" in Korea. In a series of provocative essays written by Korean and Western scholars, we see how Korean women and men actively engage, and at times openly contest, the limitations of gender. Under Construction is part of a decisive turn in the anthropology of gender--from its early quest for the causes of female subordination to a finely tuned analysis of the historical, cultural, and class-based specificities of gender relations and the tension between gender as an ideological construct and as a lived experience. Firmly grounded in the political and economic history of south Korea, this long-awaited volume fills an important gap in Korean studies and East Asia gender studies in English.

Morgan Y. Liu provides a rare ground-level analysis of post-Soviet Central Asia’s social and political paradoxes by focusing on an urban ethnic community: the Uzbeks in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, who have maintained visions of societal renewal throughout economic upheaval, political discrimination, and massive violence. This study examines the culturally specific ways that Osh Uzbeks are making sense of their post-Soviet dilemmas. These practices reveal deep connections with Soviet and Islamic sensibilities and with everyday acts of dwelling in urban neighborhoods. Osh Uzbeks engage the spaces of their city to shape their orientations relative to the wider world, postsocialist transformations, Islamic piety, moral personhood, and effective leadership.