Thoreau's Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild explores how Thoreau crafted a life open to "the Wild," a term that marks the startling element of foreignness in every object of experience, however familiar. Thoreau's encounters with nature, Bennett argues, allowed him to resist his all-too-human tendency toward intellectual laziness, social conformity, and political complacency. Bennett pursues this theme by constructing a series of dialogues between Thoreau and our contemporari...

Lee sat in the window facing the Bridge as calmly as his emotions would allow, waiting the moment when this day would enhance his lifes story. He drank the last of his coffee, spoke good-day to the waiter, and walked out into the morning mist off the East River. He strode toward the Bridge, many thoughts crowding his youthful mind. He had one more thing to do and now was the time

In influx & efflux Jane Bennett pursues a question that was bracketed in her book Vibrant Matter: how to think about human agency in a world teeming with powerful nonhuman influences? “Influx & efflux”—a phrase borrowed from Whitman's "Song of Myself"—refers to everyday movements whereby outside influences enter bodies, infuse and confuse their organization, and then exit, themselves having been transformed into something new. How to describe the human efforts in...

I was born in the flat fertile Mississippi Delta in 1940. I grew up in a white clapboard plantation house on the heels of the Great Depression when cotton was still running the show in the south and well before the Civil Rights Movement. Love took me out of the Delta, and it was love that brought me back, for there are some things that cannot be forgotten or left behind. So, here it is. After all the years that have come and gone, here is a Delta girl seeing the grand old South through a w...

Taking seriously the argument that things have politics, Political Matter seeks to develop a fully materialist theory of politics, one that opens new possibilities for imagining the relationship between scientific and political practices. The contributors assert that without such a theory the profusion of complex materials with and through which we live-plastic bags, smart cars, and long-life lightbulbs, for example-too often leaves us oscillating between fearful repudiation and g...

In Vibrant Matter the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public event...

It is a commonplace that the modern world cannot be experienced as enchanted--that the very concept of enchantment belongs to past ages of superstition. Jane Bennett challenges that view. She seeks to rehabilitate enchantment, showing not only how it is still possible to experience genuine wonder, but how such experience is crucial to motivating ethical behavior. A creative blend of political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, this book is a powerful and innovative contribution to a...

Pathologist Toni Day and her husband, Hal, are mystified when she starts receiving grisly Christmas cards depicting murders, each accompanied by a twisted verse from The Twelve Days of Christmas, and she and her partners are suddenly inundated with autopsies on the corresponding bodies. The victims are members of a jury that convicted Toni’s old boyfriend Robbie of kidnapping and sent him to prison. Robbie is now out on parole and is presumably systematically killing off the jury that put ...

Lee Payne sat alone on a park bench, gripping the worn leather journal to his chest and facing the Lady in the Harbor. President Grover Cleveland had dedicated her on a blustery autumn day last year. Lee thought of the immigrants but, above all, of the Irish street urchin called Malachi OMalley and the lofty promise the president had made that we would not neglect one of them. Just a few years ago, Lees family had been willing to fight although it had not been necessary in their environmen...

Material Ecocriticism offers new ways to analyze language and reality, human and nonhuman life, mind and matter, without falling into well-worn paths of thinking. Bringing ecocriticism closer to the material turn, the contributions to this landmark volume focus on material forces and substances, the agency of things, processes, narratives and stories, and making meaning out of the world. This broad-ranging reflection on contemporary human experience and expression provokes new understandin...

As a transplanted northern boy, I never understood the motives for such commitment to sacrifi ce from the men and women of the South. I have now been granted a look into the depth of family, faith and community that drove this war for independence. Isaacs House is more than just a good novel. It is a heartfelt love story within a love story of the Old South. Jane Bennett Gaddy is a true daughter of Mississippi, and she speaks from depths of devotion to her heritage with compassion in every...

Jane Bennett Gaddy has captured in her third installment of the Payne family, JOAB, a piece of the history for Faulkners little postage stamp of native soil with a combination of history and fiction. She places Joab in Oxford, known as Jefferson in the Faulkner novels, at a time when this town was at its lowest. History and fiction sometimes come together and Gaddy has given us something, as Oxonians, to think about in our little postage stamp of native soil.Jack Lamar Mayfield, Co...