Gila Stopler's "Women's Rights in Liberal States"

Gila Stopler is Full Professor of Law and former Dean of Law School at the College of Law & Business, Israel. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of Law & Ethics of Human Rights.

Stopler applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Women's Rights in Liberal States: Patriarchy, Liberalism, Religion and the Chimera of Rights, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Women’s Rights in Liberal States says:

The extension of the protection of religious liberty beyond churches to a wide range of organizations with a religious ethos is characteristic of many liberal democracies and is highly significant as far as women's right to equality is concerned. As described above, wide nets of religiously based charitable and educational institutions, many of which are publicly funded, are free to preach and practice discrimination against women behind the protective shield of religious liberty. From emergency rooms in Catholic hospitals that refuse to administer emergency contraception to women, through religious schools that teach school children about women's inferiority, to religious employers who refuse to hire women or who discriminate against them in pay, the liberal democratic state aids, protects, and finances the dissemination of discrimination against women in the interest of protecting religious liberty.

In his study of public religions in the modern world, Casanova posits that there are three levels on which religions can be involved in the public sphere. The first is through its establishment at the state level. The second level is the level of political society, through confessional parties and through the involvement of religious institutions and groups in political and electoral mobilization. The third level is the level of civil society on which religions participate in the public discourse on various issues. Casanova argues that ultimately only at the level of civil society can religions have a legitimate public role, consistent with modern universalistic principles and with differentiated structures. In this Chapter I have shown that in contemporary Western liberal democracies religions have a significant public role on all three levels, which adversely affects the situation of women. I would therefore argue that contrary to common perception religion state relations in liberal democracies pose a serious challenge to women's rights....

Does the Page 99 Test work?

Yes, it does. The crux of the argument in the book, which is reflected very well on page 99, is that Western liberal democracies give patriarchal religions too much power, legitimacy and protection. Patriarchal religions then use their power and legitimacy, and the protection of the state, to restrict the rights of women in both the public and the private spheres and to adversely affect women’s status in society, all with the sanction of the liberal state.

Page 99 is the last page in chapter 3 of the book. While it reflects the crux of the argument in the book, the full argument is more multilayered and complex. The book is divided into three parts. The first part (chapters 1 and 2) discusses the historical, societal, and theoretical roots of discrimination against women. It explains the historical rise of patriarchy through patriarchal religion and culture and shows how patriarchy has been embedded in liberal theory and in the practice of liberal states. The second part of the book (chapters 3 and 4), which includes page 99, explains how, contrary to popular belief, religion state relations in liberal states adversely affect women’s rights. Patriarchal religions are regarded as respectable and as promoting public virtue and moral values regardless of and sometimes because of their discriminatory stances toward women, and the separation between religion and the state which is assumed to protect women against the power of patriarchal religion fails to do so. In part III (chapters 5 and 6) the book discusses the decline of liberal hegemony, the rise of populism, and their effects on the rights of women. Through an analysis of American Supreme Court cases such as Hobby Lobby and Dobbs the book argues that the resurgence and repoliticization of patriarchal religion in the twenty-first century has further magnified the threats facing women’s rights in Western liberal states such as the USA. It argues that the repoliticization of religion in the new millennium is often part and parcel of the rise of nationalism and of right-wing populism, and together these phenomena threaten not only the rights of women, but the future of liberal democracy itself.

Visit Gila Stopler's website.

--Marsha Zeringue

Elisabeth Paling Funk's "The Dutch World of Washington Irving"

Born in the Netherlands, Elisabeth Paling Funk received her PhD from Fordham University, taught English at the university level, and is now a translator, editor, and independent scholar. She lives in the Hudson Valley.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Dutch World of Washington Irving: Knickerbocker's History of New York and the Hudson Valley Folktales, and reported the following:

Serendipitously, page 99 of The Dutch World of Washington Irving: Knickerbocker’s History and the Hudson Valley Folktales opens near the beginning of a section in chapter three, entitled “The Oral Tradition.” This chapter deals with all aspects of New Netherland’s popular culture as Irving blends these within the Knickerbocker History’s narrative, and page 99 gives an excellent example of Irving’s major purpose and his way with Dutch-American folk material. Knickerbocker’s History illustrates Irving’s view that traditions and beliefs constitute an essential part of a people’s history. The stories of the Hudson Valley tales are wholly subservient to his purpose: to describe the distinctive life, traditions, and beliefs within the Dutch-American communities of former New Netherland. My first two chapters complete the picture; they investigate Irving’s treatment of New Netherland’s history and the presence in that work of Jacob Cats, a major seventeenth-century Dutch poet. But popular culture in all its manifestations is an important part of Irving’s History of New York and dominates the Hudson Valley folktales. Long before the study of folklore became a scholarly pursuit, Irving’s description of life in the Hudson Valley made him America’s first folklorist.

“The Oral Tradition” of chapter three treats all folk belief—omens, visions, ghosts, witchcraft, demonism—that are represented in The History of New York, and begins with legendry. Much of page 99 examines Irving’s claim, attributed to Juffredus Petri, that America was settled by “a skaiting party from Friesland.” Petri, or Sjoerd Pieters, a sixteenth-century Frisian scholar who intermingled the fabulous with historical facts, told of Frisian noblemen who, in 1030, discovered the New World and populated Chile. The “skaiting party” is Irving’s fiction, but his choice of activity for such intrepid explorers is apt; through the ages, Frisians have been known as master skaters, whose speed skating skills would become legendary in tales of extraordinary prowess.

A discussion of The Flying Dutchman follows. Irving’s use of this legendary ghost ship in the History’s 1809 edition is among the first in world literature and carries all the major elements of the legend in its oral tradition. He returns to it in the tale, “The Storm Ship,” explored in chapter five.

Next, the Dutch Saint Nicholas in religion, folk belief, and celebration is traced from his origin through the Middle Ages, when he acquired an additional role as folk hero. "The Oral Tradition" then follows him through his fateful adventures during the Reformation to his arrival and continued celebration by the Dutch in the New World. Irving’s adoption and transformation of the Dutch folk hero in his History of New York are extensively analyzed and shown to have developed into today’s American Santa Claus, a process that is further investigated in the epilogue.

Learn more about The Dutch World of Washington Irving at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nathan K. Hensley's "Action without Hope"

Nathan K. Hensley is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University, where he works on nineteenth-century British literature, critical theory, environmental humanities, and the novel. His other areas of research include Anglophone modernism and the cultures of contemporary globalization. His first book, Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (2016), explores how Victorian writers expanded the capacities of literary form to account for the ongoing violence of liberal modernity.

Hensley applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Action without Hope: Victorian Literature after Climate Collapse, with the following results:

Page 99 of Action without Hope comes in the second chapter, which uses Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights to describe the emergence of a modern way of life that's based on a relationship of extraction toward the nonhuman world. With others in the nineteenth century, she witnessed the slow process by which an exploitative and nonregenerative and therefore, in a way, doomed social order came to feel natural. The book as a whole makes the claim that this is the world whose ruins we live in today, "climate change" or the unraveling of earth systems being just one area where the outcome of this orientation is now palpable to us. Anyway in this chapter I'm arguing that Brontë's weird and still challenging novel suggests that this autodestructive way of life is not permanent or universal, but emerged at a specific historical moment. In this sense she departs from her sister Charlotte, who in Jane Eyre gave shape to the far more pacific view that bourgeois society could enable something like happiness or fulfillment. I write:

Written twelve years after this letter [in which Charlotte refers to the 'spoilt' personality of a neighbor from a slave-owning family], Jane Eyre would expunge this spoilt demon [i.e. Bertha Mason] from the record, leaving the stain of the plantation complex behind in a pile of charred rubble so as to clear space for heteronormative futurity between white characters, such that (as Jane reports) “perfect concord is the result” (C. Brontë, Jane Eyre, 519).19 “My Edward and I,” says Jane in conclusion, “are happy: and the more so, because those we most love are happy likewise” (C. Brontë, Jane Eyre, 520).

Emily’s view was darker. In a now-famous school essay she composed in Belgium, “The Butterfly” (1842), she wrote that “the universe appeared . . . a vast machine constructed only to produce evil” (178). As the semi-fictionalized speaker of the essay works through this insight, (s)he comes to see in the butterfly an image of how splendid beauty, “lustrous gold and purple,” can emerge from pure violence: nature “exists,” the narrator says “on a principle of destruction” (E. Brontë, “Butterfly,” 176).20 In Emily’s school essay, this principle is imagined as universal, valid in all times and all places.

Wuthering Heights would transform this grim metaphysics into a violent scenario many readers have mistaken for eternal. The tendency toward ruin in the novel appears to be a dynamic outside time. In fact it is rigorously dated, the book’s principle of destruction arriving along with its “suitable pair” of central exogamous characters (E. Brontë, Wuthering, 1). Heathcliff arrives at Wuthering Heights in 1781, at the height of the Liverpool-based slave economy, and Lockwood arrives in 1801, at the dawn of a new, modern century: twinned advents marked with a slanted chronological specificity I will describe more below. In this way is the auto-demolishing character of accumulation by extraction marked as historically emergent and dynamic across time, the “convergence between progress and decay” structuring the book (Hiday 248) only one modality by which it investigates the intimacy between luster and ruin across the period of an aspirationally universalizing Atlantic capitalism.

The Wuthering Heights chapter is crucial to the book because it helps frame my point (which is really Emily Brontë's point) that we currently inhabit a world whose normal order of operation is based, as Brontë puts it, on a principle of destruction. The fossil fueled imperialism of our present is in some ways a ghostly replay of the nineteenth century: the rapacious capture of the object world and the domination of subordinated peoples we see when we scroll through the news are in some ways hyperspeed versions of the social order Brontë watched gathering around her in the 1840s. So in that sense there is a representative quality to this passage, for sure. But the book also ranges further than this local argument about a gathering fossil capitalism and its afterlives. It's about how to inhabit systems that are dissolving and breaking and inescapable, and still find ways to elaborate new worlds out of those broken inheritances.

That's a long way of saying that in some ways the Page 99 Test works for Action without Hope—I think. In fact one thread of the book is about just this question of parts and wholes: how a tiny detail can evoke a much larger configuration. As I try to say in the book, this synecdochal quality is a literary effect, of course, but it's also how all thinking happens. We develop emblems for larger concepts, images that feel vivid, but point to something beyond themselves. Observing this scalar and figural quality of all thinking leads me to spend a lot of time mulling over the idea of the detail: what is a detail, how can small things matter, and what kinds of perceptual capacities do we need to appreciate both the texture of the small thing, and the dynamic ways it connects to the broader world of which it's only a partial evocation? This is the plot of Middlemarch, as I say in the book, and it's also why Action without Hope works on two levels: it's an argument for the quiet power of small, nearly insignificant activities, and also a manifesto for the kinds of reading that are necessary to appreciate those tiny things. I think people should look at page 151, too: that's my favorite one.

Visit Nathan K. Hensley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Matthews's "Sex and Love in Porfirian Mexico City"

Michael Matthews is professor of history at Elon University. He is the author of The Civilizing Machine: A Cultural History of Mexican Railroads, 1876–1910.

Matthews applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sex and Love in Porfirian Mexico City: A Social History of Working-Class Courtship, and shared the following:

Opening to page 99 takes the reader smack-dab in the middle of one of the many rapto cases that serve as the basis of this book, albeit one of the more salacious and titillating examples. The crime of rapto in turn-of-the-century Mexico, while defined as the abduction of an underage woman from parental authority, also often functioned as elopements planned by young couples in the face of family opposition. This case, which stems from a mysterious set of events that took place in 1907 between one romantically involved couple, although not representative of the entire book, does highlight key themes: societal gender norms and expectations; gendered performativity, especially before legal authorities; concerns about female virginity; and male anxieties about how modernization spurred female sexual freedom. On this page, specifically, we find twenty-seven-year-old police officer Guillermo, defending himself before an investigating judge for the abduction of fourteen-year-old Carmen, a teenage girl who he courted. Guillermo seeks to undermine her social standing before the judge claiming that she was not a virgin when they had sex because she had admitted to him that “one night while dreaming she had introduced her finger and…lost her virginity.” We also find, on this page, that Carmen’s mother seeks to undermine Guillermo social standing and manhood by claiming that he abandoned his pregnant girlfriend to chase after her daughter. The mother, finishing her declaration to the judge, submits a clipping from a popular Mexico City newspaper of a fictional story she claimed Guillermo wrote. Although continuing onto the following page, it tells the tale of a flirtatious coquet also named Carmen—who happens to live on the very street on which the real Carmen lived. In the story, the coquet uses revealing clothes and attractive makeup to lure two young men into a deadly duel over her affection. One dies and the other is sent to prison while Carmen looks on with glee from her tenement building window.

While page 99 highlights key themes, the book, more broadly, seeks to show the vast diversity of different ways that turn-of-the-century Mexico City’s expanding infrastructure, increased factory work, and new leisure and entertainment activities shaped the courtship and sexual practices of the working class.

Learn more about Sex and Love in Porfirian Mexico City at the University Press of Florida website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eugenia Zuroski's "A Funny Thing"

Eugenia Zuroski is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Ontario. She is the author of A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism (2013) and editor of the journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction. She has also published two chapbooks of poetry, Kintail Beach (2022) and Hovering, Seen (2019).

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Funny Thing: Eighteenth-Century Literature Undisciplined, and reported the following:

Page 99 of A Funny Thing lands us on the page in which I discuss Horace Walpole’s Preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto, published in 1765. I would say that this page both does and does not give the reader a good sense of the work as a whole.

It does in the sense that it drops the reader right into a bit of historical literary criticism, in which I analyze how the different prefaces frame the tale for eighteenth-century readers, shifting their expectations of what literature is for. Such is the bread and butter of literary analysis, which is what this book is made of. A reader who is not already interested in literature from this period might conclude that this book would bore them—and maybe they’d be right. A Funny Thing is a work of academic literary criticism, and as such, it dwells deeply with textual detail and cultural context.

But the page does not at all give a sense of the breadth of texts and contexts that the book contains, nor its sense of humor! It doesn’t tell you, for example, that before page 99 you get a long discussion of flying penises in Western art and culture (with pictures!), or that the discussion of Walpole leads to a heartfelt meditation on the forms of intimacy he cultivated through shared creative projects with his friends, or that I connect The Castle of Otranto to Daniel Lavery’s absolutely brilliant series from The Toast, “Erotica Written By an Alien Pretending Not to Be Horrified by the Human Body,” or that the book culminates in an extended reading of Bob the Drag Queen’s “iconic wig reveal” on the show “We’re Here.”

In a way, though, page 99 is perfect, because it contains the epigraph to The Castle of Otranto where Walpole deliberately misquotes Horace from the Ars Poetica in a playful and irreverent effort to make space in British literature for departures from neoclassical standards—to refuse the empirical, the tasteful, the serious, and the proper in favor of the flighty, the silly, the outrageous, the funny. And this exact close reading, of this preface, which I have been teaching for years, was the seed of the entire project. So to me, this page really is the heart of the book, and the book is dear to my heart.

Visit Eugenia Zuroski's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf's "Remnants of Refusal"

Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Ohio University.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Remnants of Refusal: Feminist Affect, National Trauma, with the following results:

On page 99 of my book, Remnants of Refusal: Feminist Affect, National Trauma, the reader confronts two film stills: the first, from Yasujirô Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953), and below, the second, from Jia Zhangke’s The World (2004). In both shots, an elderly couple sits on a low concrete wall, their faces in profile, their expressions impassive, their shoulders slightly hunched. The couples are dressed in traditional or anachronistic clothing: in Ozu’s film, they wear kimonos, while in Jia’s, the man dons a Mao suit and cap- the uniform of the latter-day proletariat. The Japanese couple in the first still, denizens of the provincial city Onomichi, have traveled to Tokyo to visit their adult children. However, they are quickly sent away by their distracted, inattentive eldest son and daughter to a hot spring spa in the tourist city of Atami. The Chinese couple in the second still, from impoverished Shanxi province, have come to Beijing to bury their son who perished under dangerous conditions as an unlicensed construction worker. Though not shown in these stills, most of the young people in these two films contrast to their elders in their energy and their frenzy to “make it” in the big city.

In the short paragraph on page 99, I explain—as other scholars have also noted—that Ozu and Jia’s films criticize periods of national transition following historical trauma- in this case the Second World War and the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. I write, “Ozu’s film laments the cultural fallout wrought by the early years of the Japanese economic miracle; Jia’s film likewise questions what has become of time-honored beliefs as China enters the age of neoliberal globalization.” This coincides with my book’s larger argument that certain works of film and literature reveal what I term “remnants of refusal,” echoes and afterimages of the past that have been left in suspension between nationally dominant rhetorics of constant progress and the affective persistence of the unmourned past.

Should browsers apply the significance of the images on page 99 to my book as a whole, they would also glean several additional incitements that lie at its heart. Remnants of Refusal: Feminist Affect, National Trauma examines literature and film, engaging in how these works speak affectively—though their melancholy, ambivalence, or exhaustion—to the repression of historical trauma. The film stills on page 99—the immobilized elderly couples gazing without a clear aim at the horizon—serve as examples of these affects and of those figures left behind by national campaigns of renewal. My book claims, too, that such responses align with a feminist position. Ozu and Jia’s films feature women protagonists (Noriko in Tokyo Story and Zhao Tao in The World) who identify with their elders, suggesting a feminist protest to historical waves that cast the nation forward over the unresolved past. Finally, while my book primarily stages these arguments though French and Chinese literature and film, the comparison between China and Japan on page 99 reveals a key — if perhaps implicit — argument: that melancholy, ambivalence, and exhaustion may be affective forms of protest in works of art beyond these two nations, that we might consider how they operate globally.

Learn more about Remnants of Refusal at the SUNY Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alexander Menrisky's "Everyday Ecofascism"

Alexander Menrisky is assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is author of Wild Abandon: American Literature and the Identity Politics of Ecology.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Everyday Ecofascism chiefly highlights the cultural critic Theodore Roszak’s concept of “reversionary-technophiliac synthesis,” which he developed in his long 1986 essay From Satori to Silicon Valley. In it, Roszak, who popularized the term “counterculture,” suggested that participants in the back-to-the-land movement of the late 1960s and 1970s were not as averse to technological advancement as popular media often portray them. Rather, they were often confident that new technologies could (perhaps paradoxically) help them to rediscover and reclaim putatively originary lifeways, social arrangements, and authentic modes of being on the earth. Perhaps no primary text of the time captured this optimism better than Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, which served not only as a guidebook for many communalists but also as a directory of tools they could purchase to help them establish their communities—as well as a sense of their own privileged belonging in a given environment. As I put in the book, “[c]onsuming (and using) products in a marketplace of organic commodities would itself be one way to prove that one had been ‘chosen’ by the land.”

Readers opening Everyday Ecofascism to this page would get a good sense of the scope of this chapter, which focuses on how commodity consumption grounded certain counterculturalists’ claims to a naturalized relationship with the earth. They would likely not, however, immediately understand its relation to the book’s titular term: ecofascism. The word has become increasingly prominent in both popular and academic takes on right-wing environmentalism, especially among mass shooters such as those who targeted Mexicans and Mexican Americans in El Paso, Texas, in 2019 and Black Americans in Buffalo, New York, in 2022. My argument throughout the book, however, is that we should understand ecofascism much as the field of comparative fascist studies has come to understand fascism in general: not as a stable ideology but as a political genre that reinforces white supremacy, in this case in environmentalist contexts. Scholars of fascism have demonstrated that deep-seated, nonpartisan storytelling patterns in Germany, for example, helped propel Nazism to power across the political spectrum. Roszak’s “reversionary-technophiliac synthesis” speaks to similar cultural narratives in the U.S. that have informed not only actors such as the El Paso and Buffalo shooters, who frame people of color as “invasive species” threatening white Anglo-Saxon blood on U.S. soil, but also certain Silicon Valley executives who believe that only the investment of authoritarian power in the hands of tech tycoons can save the world from ecological catastrophe.

Learn more about Everyday Ecofascism at the University of Minnesota Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kathryn C. Lavelle's "Reluctant Conquest"

Kathryn C. Lavelle is the Ellen and Dixon Long Professor of Political Science at Case Western Reserve University and the author of The Challenges of Multilateralism. She has been a congressional fellow and a residential fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.

Lavelle applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Reluctant Conquest: American Wealth, Power, and Science in the Arctic, and reported the following:

Reluctant Conquest fails the Page 99 Test. Hopefully, however, it does not fail the entire “Pages 1-269” Course! If someone browsing the book opened it to page 99, they would find an examination of American foreign policy as it changed early in the Cold War. The page summarizes how during the early years of the Cold War, the American government was revamping itself in order to address its new role in the world following World War II. All of these changes would affect Arctic affairs, beginning with the country’s physical presence on the ground and its bilateral relations with other countries in the region, chiefly Greenland, Iceland, and Norway.

Although it is not the best single page to introduce the book, page 99 does demonstrate the book’s overarching effort to situate Arctic strategy within the arc of broader American foreign policy throughout U.S. history. That is, what factors explain the way the U.S. acts and how do the pieces of economics and science fit within overall national interests? To do this, each section draws direct ties to broader events, isolationism, and internationalism and the efforts of Indigenous peoples within a political system they did not create, but have had to work within.

Most other examinations of U.S. foreign policy in the Arctic focus on one or another aspect of this history. Many present detailed histories of Alaska. While they are valuable, Reluctant Conquest is the first comprehensive study that integrates developments in science, commerce, and military affairs. The Arctic is an area that is experiencing dramatic environmental change as well as global political realignments. This book aims to give scholars, policymakers, and general readers an understanding of how the elements have fit together time so that they will be better equipped to evaluate events as they progress in the future.

Learn more about Reluctant Conquest at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ryan Cull's "Unlimited Eligibility"

Ryan Cull is Associate Professor of English at New Mexico State University.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Unlimited Eligibility?: Inclusive Democracy and the American Lyric, with the following results:

On the one hand, page 99 of Unlimited Eligibility? Inclusive Democracy and the American Lyric is uncharacteristically almost filled with a quotation of an entire poem. On the other hand, the quoted poem, Hart Crane’s “Possessions,” is pivotal to the presentation of the concept of “looking without recognizing,” a phrase introduced at the top of the page that also serves as the title of the chapter. Why is this distinction (looking vs. recognizing) important and how is it connected to a sequence of movements, from the St. Louis Hegelians to cultural pluralism to 60s/70s-era identity politics to more recent multiculturalism, that serve as the backdrop for the poets considered in this book?

Written in 1923, at a time when the New York state legislature amended a “disorderly conduct” law so that it could target gay men, Crane’s poem boldly invites readers to “witness” his life without “apprehen[ding]” him. The latter word, of course, can denote identifying and understanding – and also the act of arresting. A contemporaneous poem, “Recitative” similarly appeals to the reader to “look” without recognizing him. In these works and others, Crane studies how being seen can be a gateway either to greater social inclusion or to deeper social exclusion (or a messy mixture of both). He knows that those who are empowered predominantly determine a culture's ways of seeing and being seen. Brave appeals and demands by minority populations seeking greater social recognition, which have significantly structured a sequence of social movements (including some of those noted above), have secured important, incremental improvements for those populations. Yet participation within this inherently hierarchical system of social recognition (involving a recognizing class, those who are recognized, as well as those partially recognized, and those unrecognized) also can tacitly reinforce those hierarchies.

By inviting readers to “witness” and “look” without “recogniz[ing]” or “apprehend[ing],” Crane resists this approach to social inclusion. Instead, he is characteristic of a group of poets studied in this book (also including Walt Whitman, Jean Toomer, James Merrill, and Thylias Moss) who explore inclusion in terms of an affirmation of ontological proximity and equality rather than an epistemological confirmation of recognizability, locating an invitation to be-with rather than an urge to know-who at the core of their artistic practice. But the book traces how this approach has limits too. Prioritizing ontological affirmation rather than confirmation of recognizability too often comes close to indulging a naïve hope of establishing a world without labels.

Renarrating the sociopolitical dimensions of American poetry through the tension between these two models of inclusion helps us to reflect on the demand that we, albeit falteringly, keep trying to learn the language of democracy, a task we must continue today.

Learn more about Unlimited Eligibility? at the State University of New York Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alexandre F. Caillot's "Late to the Fight"

Alexandre F. Caillot holds a doctorate in history from Temple University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Late to the Fight: Union Soldier Combat Performance from the Wilderness to the Fall of Petersburg, and shared the following:

Page 99 marks the start of chapter four and features two quotes from members of the 17th Vermont and 31st Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiments, the subjects of Late to the Fight. These epigraphs set the tone for the chapter, which then proceeds as follows:

On May 23, 1864, New York Herald reporter Sylvanus Cadwallader rosily depicted the progress of Union arms in the Civil War. Reflecting on the Overland Campaign, he praised the 'transcendant genius' of Grant and Meade. This journalist proclaimed that the two generals had 'triumphed over all obstacles' and 'other glorious victories await[ed] our grasp.' Cadwallader made it appear as though the Union effort to crush the Confederacy depended solely on effective leadership and thus overlooked the contributions of the rank and file at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House. Yet he anticipated 'hard fighting' should the opposing Army of Northern Virginia assume a defensive position along the North Anna River on the road to Richmond. Such a concession highlights an important question for this stage of the campaign: to what extent did the later arrivals overcome the stresses of their first two battles and continue to fight well as newly minted veterans? Contemporary historian John C. Ropes differed from Cadwallader by offering a bleaker assessment of Meade’s Army of the Potomac. Summing up the nature of this campaign, he noted that...

The Page 99 Test works well because the page draws attention to several concepts running through Late to the Fight. Its presentation of quotes from Vermonters and Mainers reflects the book’s focus on the perspective of the officers and men in these two regiments. Also, the page highlights a common tendency to credit Union victory to the generals’ decision-making instead of the soldiers’ efforts that made those plans a reality. To counter this trend, it asks how the New Englanders developed into reliable veterans amid the unprecedented conditions of the Overland and Petersburg Campaigns.

What this test does not reveal, however, is that Late to the Fight is a story about human motivation, endurance, and combat performance in which the Vermonters’ and Mainers’ voices frequently emerge. It examines the experiences of these New Englanders because they epitomized a population of approximately 820,000 soldiers who joined the Union Army after Congress passed the Enrollment Act, or draft law, in March 1863. This research challenges the consensus that contemporaries and historians alike have embraced, according to which these later arrivals lacked the patriotism and fitness for soldiering. It considers what drove them to enlist despite the bloody realities of military service so apparent by this point in the war. The book addresses what these troops faced on campaign and whether they proved worthy comrades of their predecessors in uniform, who have enjoyed greater esteem. Centering on the humble private, Late to the Fight demonstrates that the Vermonters and Mainers did their part to help achieve Union victory."

Learn more about Late to the Fight at the LSU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue