Synopses & Reviews
In a list of objectives and inquiries meant to guide and make profitable the European travel of two young Americans in 1788, Thomas Jefferson noted, Architecture is] worth great attention. As we double our numbers ever 20 years we must double our houses.... It is then among the most important arts: and it is desireable to introduce taste into an art which shews so much. Referring both to the large physical presence of architecture, as well as the ability of a structure to reveal its owner's character, Jefferson articulates the telling relationship in eighteenth-century Virginia between architecture and construction of the self. In Prodigy Houses of Virginia: Architecture and the Native Elite, Barbara Burlison Mooney employs Jefferson's theory to examine twenty-five great eighteenth-century Virginia mansions, and offer an analytical overview of Virginia's elite residential architecture from a patronage perspective.
Though it focuses on architectural history, the book concerns itself less with issues of design and construction than with the social and cultural context in which the Virginia gentry commissioned their imposing dwellings. In her examination of such places as Stratford Hall, Carter's Grove, and Gunston Hall -- mansions whose grandeur has become synonymous with the image -- if not the reality -- of life in Colonial Virginia -- Mooney illuminates the fortunes, motivations, and aspirations of the wealthy and powerful owners who built their homes with the objective of securing their status and impressing the public. In choosing to spend astonishing sums to provide themselves with grand houses that far exceeded their living requirements -- in some cases, by a disastrousmeasure -- the owners of these mansions advanced grand claims to social and political prestige.
Clearly and accessibly written, Prodigy Houses of Virginia will appeal not only to architectural and social historians of the Colonial period but also to the general reader interested in these mansions and the people who inhabited them.
Synopsis
Border Fictions offers the first comparative analysis of multiethnic and transnational cultural representations about the United States' borders with Mexico and Canada. Blending textual analysis with theories of globalization and empire, Claudia Sadowski-Smith forges a new model of inter-American studies.
Border Fictions places into dialogue a variety of hemispheric perspectives from Chicana/o, Asian American, American Indian, Latin American, and Canadian studies. Each chapter examines fiction that ranges widely, from celebrated authors such as Carlos Fuentes, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Alberto Rios to writers whose contributions to border literature have not yet been fully appreciated, including Karen Tei Yamashita, Thomas King, Janette Turner Hospital, and emerging Chicana/o writers of the U.S.-Mexico border.
Proposing a diverse and geographically expansive view of border and inter-American studies, Border Fictions links the work of these and numerous other authors to civil rights movements, environmental justice activism, struggles for land and border-crossing rights, as well as to anti-imperialist forms of nationalism in the United States' neighboring countries. The book forces us to take into account the ways in which shifts in the nature of global relations affect literary production, especially in its hemispheric manifestations.