In Unsettled States, Dana Luciano and Ivy G. Wilson present some of the most exciting emergent scholarship in American literary and cultural studies of the “long” nineteenth century. Featuring eleven essays from senior scholars across the discipline, the book responds to recent critical challenges to the boundaries, both spatial and temporal, that have traditionally organized scholarship within the field. The volume considers these recent challenges to be aftershocks of earlier revolutions in content and method, and it seeks ways of inhabiting and amplifying the ongoing unsettledness of the field.

After discussing the structuralism, post structuralism, Marxist, queer and feminist theories of dramatic action and dramaturgical development, the author posits an ontological (and refreshing) vision of Shakespearian stagecraft and dramatic movement. Shakespeare is seen as an actor and Roman Catholic, an outsider in an early modern Protestant state in the process of dynamic cultural, economic reform and political repression. These themes are reflected in the unsettled, morally ambiguous characterizations that Professor Crosman studies: Hamlet, Polonius, McBeth, Henry V and Falstaff among others.

Unsettled Matters: The Life and Death of Bruce Lee

In August of 1973 while his body was being flown from Hong Kong to Seattle, Washington, Bruce Lee's coffin mysteriously opened and the dye from his dark blue suit bled onto the coffin's white silk interior. The ancient Chinese saw this as a bad omen. "The buried man will not live in peace!" they proclaimed "There are unsettled matters!" Considered one of the foremost authorities on Bruce Lee today, Tom Bleecker not only trained privately with Lee, but the two shared numerous mutual friends in the martial arts community as well as the Hollywood film industry.