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The three books reviewed here each examine the American South with one central idea in mind: violence, citizenship, and the Atlantic world. The first two seem quite primal ideas, the sort of things historians have been using for ages, and even the Atlantic world is getting rather long in the tooth now. However, each of these three books, in different ways, demonstrates new ways of thinking about ideas central to our understandings of the South and, at their best, make the familiar strange, giving us new ways to understand an old region. Since two of them are edited collections, it probably makes best sense to take them up first, leaving the monograph for later.

Langston Hughes (1902–67), the wondering wandering poet, has left behind a rich legacy of books that never grow dusty on the shelves. There seems to be no path that Hughes left untrodden; he wrote drama, novels, short stories, two autobiographies, poetry, journalistic prose, an opera libretto, history, children's stories, and even lyrics for songs, in addition to his translations. Hughes was the first African American author to earn his living from writing and his career spans a long time, from the 1920s until the 1960s – he never stopped writing during this period. The Harlem Renaissance introduced prominent black writers who engraved their names in the American canon, such as Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston, but Hughes markedly stands out for his artistic achievements and longer career. Hughes had been identified by many as the spokesperson for his race since his works dug deep into black life, and his innovative techniques embraced black dialect and the rhythms of black music. He captured the essence of black life with conspicuous sensitivity and polished his voice throughout four decades. His name also had long been tied to the politics of identity in America. Brooding over his position, Hughes chose to take pride in being black in a racist nation. In his case, the dialectics of identity are more complicated, as they encompass debates involving Africa, black nationalism and competing constructions surrounding a seeming authentic blackness, in addition to Du Bois's double consciousness. Critics still endeavour to decipher the many enigmas Hughes left unresolved, having been a private person and a controversial writer. His career continues to broach speculative questions concerning his closeted sexual orientation and his true political position. The beginning of the new millennium coincided with the centennial of his birth and heralded the advent of new well-researched scholarship on his life and works, including Emily Bernard's Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925–1964 (2001), Kate A. Baldwin's Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (2002), Anthony Dawahare's Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature between the Wars: A New Pandora's Box (2002), Bruce R. Schwartz's Langston Hughes: Working toward Salvation (2003), and John Edgar Tidwell and Cheryl R. Ragar's edited collection Montage of a Dream: The Art and Life of Langston Hughes (2007), among others.

The most striking thing about reviewing the field of Victorian ecocriticism is that there is so little of it. This relative absence is all the more perplexing given that ecocritical work on Romanticism and nineteenth-century American literature is so profuse. Thoreau and Wordsworth remain the most-discussed authors in a field that was in many respects inaugurated by Jonathan Bate's Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (1991) and Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture (1995). Romanticism remains the point of departure for some of the most influential studies in the field, including those like Timothy Morton's Ecology Without Nature (2009) that challenge many of its core precepts. Meanwhile, ecocriticism has expanded to include many other periods and regions, with collections ranging from The Ecocritical Shakespeare (2011) to Postcolonial Ecologies (2011), and unsurprisingly, a strong turn toward the contemporary.

They push in different directions, these two great debates. The first, on the relationship between capitalism and slavery, invites us to consider how closely the two systems were connected, to the point where more and more scholars argue that slavery itself was a form of capitalism. The second, on the origins of the American Civil War, highlights the fundamental difference and growing divergence between the free labor system of the North and the slave society of the South, to the point where some scholars see an irreconcilable conflict between the two. Can these competing tendencies be reconciled? Is it possible to define southern slavery as essentially “capitalist” without losing sight of the crucial distinctions between free and enslaved labor? A number of recent books suggest that scholars have begun to recognize the problem but have not quite figured out how to solve it.

These reflections were invited by the editors of this special issue to provide a frame for analysing the significance of this set of articles on “Higher education and the state in Greater China.” They are framed around the three elements of modernity identified by Francis Fukuyama in his book The Origins of Political Order – the modern state, the rule of law and accountable government. They also highlight comparative dimensions among the three societies of Greater China.