Research & Innovation

Race, in the early modern period, is a concept at the crossroads of a set of overlapping concerns of lineage, religion, and nation. In Bad Humor, Kimberly Anne Coles charts how these concerns converged around a pseudoscientific system that confirmed the absolute difference between Protestants and Catholics, guaranteed the noble quality of English blood, and justified English colonial domination.

Coles delineates the process whereby religious error, first resident in the body, becomes marked on the skin. Early modern medical theory bound together psyche and soma in mutual influence. By the end of the sixteenth century, there is a general acceptance that the soul's condition, as a consequence of religious belief or its absence, could be manifest in the humoral disposition of the physical body. The history that this book unfolds describes developments in natural philosophy in the early part of the sixteenth century that force a subsequent reconsideration of the interactions of body and soul and that bring medical theory and theological discourse into close, even inextricable, contact. With particular consideration to how these ideas are reflected in texts by Elizabeth Cary, John Donne, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Mary Wroth, and others, Coles reveals how science and religion meet nascent capitalism and colonial endeavor to create a taxonomy of Christians in Black and White.

Bad Humour: Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England is forthcoming from University of Pennsylvania Press (April 2022). The book uncovers how belief itself — the excess, defect, or lack of religion — was largely apprehended and understood in terms of temperament in the early modern period. Race in this period is a concept at the crossroads of a set of overlapping concerns of lineage, religion, and nation. Bad Humor is about how these concerns converge around a pseudoscientific system that confirmed the absolute difference between Protestants and Catholics, guaranteed the noble quality of English blood, and justified English colonial domination.

Read more about Bad Humor
Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England.

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 134-149.

“Freedom, Now!” This rallying cry became the most iconic phrase of the Civil Rights Movement, challenging the persistent command that Black people wait―in the holds of slave ships and on auction blocks, in segregated bus stops and schoolyards―for their long-deferred liberation.

In Black Patience, Julius B. Fleming Jr. argues that, during the Civil Rights Movement, Black artists and activists used theater to energize this radical refusal to wait. Participating in a vibrant culture of embodied political performance that ranged from marches and sit-ins to jail-ins and speeches, these artists turned to theater to unsettle a violent racial project that Fleming refers to as “Black patience.” Inviting the likes of James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Douglas Turner Ward, Duke Ellington, and Oscar Brown Jr. to the stage, Black Patience illuminates how Black artists and activists of the Civil Rights era used theater to expose, critique, and repurpose structures of white supremacy. In this bold rethinking of the Civil Rights Movement, Fleming contends that Black theatrical performance was a vital technology of civil rights activism, and a crucial site of Black artistic and cultural production.

The book reexamines and reconceives the role of the author, the status of implied authors, the model for unnatural narrative theory, the nature of narrative, and the ideological implications of narrative forms. It also explores the status of historical characters in fictional texts, the paradoxes of realism, the presence of multiple implied readers, the role of actual readers, and the question of fictionality. In addition, an appendix offers a useful approach for teaching narrative theory.

The book includes analyses of works by Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov, Beckett, Jeanette Winterson, Deborah Eisenberg, and others. Throughout, it argues for a more expansive conception of narrative theory and keen attention to the nature and difference of fiction. This provocative book makes crucial interventions in ongoing critical debates about narrative theory, literary theory, and the theory of fictionality, and is essential reading for all students of narrative.

Read more about Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts.

A bold rethinking of the Civil Rights Movement through the lens of Black theater.

“Freedom, Now!” This rallying cry became the most iconic phrase of the Civil Rights Movement, challenging the persistent command that Black people wait—in the holds of slave ships and on auction blocks, in segregated bus stops and schoolyards—for their long-deferred liberation.

In Black Patience, Julius B. Fleming Jr. argues that, during the Civil Rights Movement, Black artists and activists used theater to energize this radical refusal to wait. Participating in a vibrant culture of embodied political performance that ranged from marches and sit-ins to jail-ins and speeches, these artists turned to theater to unsettle a violent racial project that Fleming refers to as “Black patience.” Inviting the likes of James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Douglas Turner Ward, Duke Ellington, and Oscar Brown Jr. to the stage, Black Patience illuminates how Black artists and activists of the Civil Rights era used theater to expose, critique, and repurpose structures of white supremacy. In this bold rethinking of the Civil Rights Movement, Fleming contends that Black theatrical performance was a vital technology of civil rights activism, and a crucial site of Black artistic and cultural production.

Summary

Since the rise of the novel, authors have endeavored to represent work. Yet work has been a long-standing representational problem in fiction. Elaine Scarry asks, how does one represent discretely an action that is characterized by its ongoing and repetitive nature? How does one craft engaging plots around the tedium of work? Why would readers want to read about toil during their own respite from it? Even when an occupation serves as shorthand for character or the workplace serves as a central setting, the representation of work itself is only seldom the focus of fictional narrative. Since 1980, an additional representational problem seems to appear. If US fiction concerned with work and labor previously tended to focus on agrarian, manual, and industrial labor, how does it represent work in an era in which the service industries dominate the labor market? Where are work and labor to be found in contemporary fiction? This entry opens with a brief survey of the economic conditions of this period and their effects on working life. It then examines the sectors of the labor market that are most legible in US fiction since 1980: fictions of deindustrialization; office fictions of the downwardly mobile middle class; fictions of the now dominant interactive service industries; fictions of immigration and migration that respond to the transnational movement of labor; and, finally, fictions of tech start-ups and the gig economy that have recently emerged. It concludes that while the representational problem remains, the themes of work and labor endure.

Available in spring 2022.

A case reflection on mobilizing bereavement resources to honor a child at the end-of-life.

Read "An Honorable Ending: Mobilizing Bereavement Resources Amidst a Christmas Tragedy."

Prairie Schooner.