Bookshelf: Arts + Humanities Division

Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History

Timothy Hampton
2022

Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History tells a new story about the cultural imagination of the West wherein cheerfulness — a momentary uptick in emotional energy, a temporary lightening of spirit — functions as a crucial theme in literary, philosophical, and artistic creations from early modern to contemporary times. In dazzling interpretations of Shakespeare and Montaigne, Hume, Austen and Emerson, Dickens, Nietzsche, and Louis Armstrong, Hampton explores the philosophical construal of cheerfulness — as a theme in Protestant theology, a focus of medical writing, a topic in...

Practice of the Presence

Carmen Acevedo Butcher (translator)
2022

"Everything is possible for those who believe, even more for those who hope, still more for those who love, and most of all for those who practice and persevere in these three powerful paths."

Since it was first published in its pocket-size 1692 edition, Brother Lawrence's spiritual classic has remained in print, beloved by people of varying spiritual paths and religious traditions. With this new translation, award-winning translator Carmen Acevedo Butcher frees it from its centuries-long prison of dogmatic, binary language and brings fresh, inclusive...

Afro-Atlantic Catholics: America's First Black Christians

Jeroen Dewulf
2022

Black Christianity in America has long been studied as a blend of indigenous African and Protestant elements. Jeroen Dewulf redirects the conversation by focusing on the enduring legacy of seventeenth-century Afro-Atlantic Catholics in the broader history of African American Christianity. With homelands in parts of Africa with historically strong Portuguese influence, such as the Cape Verde Islands, São Tomé, and Kongo, these Africans embraced variants of early modern Portuguese Catholicism that they would take with them to the Americas as part of the forced migration that was the...

In the Volcano's Mouth

Miriam Bird Greenberg
2016
Miriam Bird Greenberg’s stunning first collection, which roves across a lush, haunting rural America both real and imagined, observed from railyards and roadsides, evokes the world of myth (“I’d spent my childhood / in a house made of bees; on hot days honey // dripped through cracks in the ceiling,” she writes). Yet these capacious, exquisitely tensioned poems are rooted in Greenberg’s experiences hitchhiking and hopping freight trains across North America, or draw from her informal interviews with contemporary nomads, hobos, and others living on society’s edges. Beneath their surface runs a...

Imagining World Order

Chenxi Tang
2018

In early modern Europe, international law emerged as a means of governing relations between rapidly consolidating sovereign states, purporting to establish a normative order for the perilous international world. However, it was intrinsically fragile and uncertain, for sovereign states had no acknowledged common authority that would create, change, apply, and enforce legal norms. In Imagining World Order, Chenxi Tang shows that international world order was as much a literary as a legal matter. To begin with, the poetic imagination contributed to the making of international law...

Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer: Undocumented Vignettes from a Pre-American Life

Alberto Ledesma
2017

“The future of America, its openness and understanding that we, as a nation, have always depended has thrived on the energy, ideas and struggle of immigrants like Alberto Ledesma. The promised land can only be envisioned by the newcomer to our shore. Ledesma’s story, its powerful images, is needed now more than ever in an age of rising xenophobia and continual exploitation.” —Andrew Lam, winner of the PEN Open Book Award

“Alberto Ledesma’s gorgeous drawings have fascinated me for a long time. Now his stunning work has become a book for the ages.” —Luis Alberto Urrea

In this...

The Cloud of Unknowing

Translated by Carmen Acevedo Butcher
2018

This anonymous fourteenth-century text is the glory of English mysticism, and one of the most practical and useful guides to finding union with God ever written. Carmen Acevedo Butcher’s new translation is the first to bring the text into a modern English idiom—while remaining strictly faithful to the meaning of the original Middle English.

The Cloud of Unknowing consists of a series of letters written by a monk to his student or disciple, instructing him (or her) in the way of Divine union. Its theology is presented in a way that is remarkably easy...