Anna Parnell, sister of the great Irish leader Charles Stuart Parnell, was a major political force in her own right and a pioneer radical journalist and feminist. This critical edition of her political essays discusses her, her writings for Irish, British and American newspapers. In 1880, the Parnell sisters, Anna and Fanny, founded two branches of the Ladies Land League, one in New York and one in Dublin. While C.S.Parnell was confined to Kilmainham prison, his two sisters aimed to keep up the agitation for Irish Home Rule as well as but pressure on the British government to permit it.

This is the first serious historical study of birdkeeping in America from colonial times to the present. It documents and discusses the various forms of commercial birdkeeping and the opportunities it offered to women and some minorities. Research into state and national political activities of birdkeepers and their sometimes strained relations with each other (hobbyists vs professionals, preservation of environment vs. commercial exploitation) are discussed.

Vachel Lindsay introduced a genuinely new rhythm into American poetry and was America’s first real folk poet—superior to Sandburg and articulating a sense of awe, loss and resentment at the passing of the older freedoms and dignities of pre industrial America. His topics (Negro revivals, Salvation Army meetings, Chautauqua gatherings) would seem to be utterly dated---yet Lindsay was a modernist in spite of himself and influenced greatly later poets and writers as dis separate as Hart Crane, Edgar Lee Masters, Robert Frost ,James T Farrell and William Faulkner as well as Jack Kerouac.

This hitherto unpublished diary, edited and with notes by Dr. Rogal, provides a valuable research tool for understanding the place of religion in immediate post Revolutionary America specifically amongst the American Methodist Episcopal Church members Bishop Whatcoat had as his flock.

Biography with writings, poems and translations of James Keegan(1859-1894). Keegan was a supporter(along with Douglas Hyde) of the Irish Gaelic League and was part of the early Irish Renaissance in creative writing and national consciousness. Keegan, whilst a priest, also wrote for national journals under a variety of pseudonyms and with an uncanny ability to favete linguis as far as his superiors were concerned. Little is known of Keegan and this is the first full study of his brief but active career and his literary production. Keegan worked as an parish priest in Ireland and in the U.S.

This research work deals with subjects of great interest in current criticism---the impact of the New Historicist studies on the interpretation of American literary naturalism, and the issue of the possible persistence of the movement in contemporary fiction. Other essays deal with Norris, Crane and Dreiser who have up to now been considered canonical figures within literary naturalism while Wharton and Chopin are discussed as recent and welcome additions to the discussion of this movement and American literature in general.

Is there a unique visual infrastructure that keeps and defines a culture? Professor Guillen discusses a culture built entirely on the visual modality and, most significantly, on that province of the visual we negotiate through the written word.

Dr.Foster(author of MELANCHOLY DUTY,Kluwer,1997)has undertaken a critique of American decadence and moral squalor. He argues that three basic cultural phenomena have conjoined to warp and degrade the moral and cultural landscape of the country. Treated together for purposes of critique these phenomena have intertwined: in the national pysche: They are the impact of personalism(via J.J.Rosseau) and the leveraged individual, the growth of the theraputic state and the overwhelming preoccupation with entertainment.

John Hay’s distinguished national service began when he was Lincohn’s private secretary and continued until up to his death as Secretary of State for two presidents. For a public man under scrutiny (including numerous biographies and Henry Adam’s insightful portrait in THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS) little is known about Hay and his anonymous commentaries, reviews and critiques written during the Civil War. Dr. Hill’s new monograph remedies that situation.

This research monograph is an important contribution to the study of the author, Kurt Vonnegut and the great evolutionary scientist Charles Darwin. The book examines Darwin’s influence on the American culture that were Vonnegut's major focus and interest and the source of his importance as a major American writer of the later half of the 20th century.