Since public discourse about AIDS began in 1981, it has characterized AIDS as an apocalyptic plague: a punishment for sin and a sign of the end of the world. Christian fundamentalists had already configured the gay male population most visibly affected by AIDS as apocalyptic signifiers or signs of the "end times." Their discourse grew out of a centuries-old American apocalypticism that included images of crisis, destruction, and ultimate renewal. In this book, Thomas L. Long examines the ways in which gay and AIDS activists, artists, writers, scientists, and journalists appropriated this apocalyptic rhetoric in order to mobilize attention to the medical crisis, prevent the spread of the disease, and treat the HIV infected. Using the analytical tools of literary analysis, cultural studies, performance theory, and social semiotics, AIDS and American Apocalypticism examines many kinds of discourse, including fiction, drama, performance art, demonstration graphics and brochures, biomedical publications, and journalism and shows that, while initially useful, the effects of apocalyptic rhetoric in the long term are dangerous. Among the important figures in AIDS activism and the arts discussed are David Drake, Tim Miller, Sarah Schulman, and Tony Kushner, as well as the organizations ACT UP and Lesbian Avengers.

Telling Time is a scholarly book that explores how novelists wrote about AIDS during the first decade of the epidemic, when HIV and AIDS were considered death sentences and most often associated with homosexuality and the gay community. The book explores the different narrative strategies used by novelists to represent the temporality of AIDS, looking at Paul Reed’s Facing It: a Novel of AIDS, David Feinberg’s Eighty-Sixed and Spontaneous Combustion, and Paul Monette’s Afterlife and Halfway Home, and how a few novels did manage to resist the apocalyptic dominant rhetoric of AIDS. The book also discusses the difficulties of publishing AIDS novels by people of color and such writers as E. Lynn Harris and Steve Corbin. Telling Time includes a comprehensive annotated bibliography of all American AIDS novels published from 1982-1992 as a reference guide for further reading.

Telling Time is a scholarly book that explores how novelists wrote about AIDS during the first decade of the epidemic, when HIV and AIDS were considered death sentences and most often associated with homosexuality and the gay community. The book explores the different narrative strategies used by novelists to represent the temporality of AIDS, looking at Paul Reed's Facing It: a Novel of AIDS, David Feinberg's Eighty-Sixed and Spontaneous Combustion, and Paul Monette's Afterlife and Halfway Home, and how a few novels did manage to resist the apocalyptic dominant rhetoric of AIDS. The book also discusses the difficulties of publishing AIDS novels by people of color and such writers as E. Lynn Harris and Steve Corbin. Telling Time includes a comprehensive annotated bibliography of all American AIDS novels published from 1982-1992 as a reference guide for further reading.

A new approach to the vast nuclear infrastructure and the apocalypses it produces, focusing on Black, queer, Indigenous, and Asian American literatures Since 1945, America has spent more resources on nuclear technology than any other national project. Although it requires a massive infrastructure that touches society on myriad levels, nuclear technology has typically been discussed in a limited, top-down fashion that clusters around powerful men. In Infrastructures of Apocalypse, Jessica Hurley turns this conventional wisdom on its head, offering a new approach that focuses on neglected authors and Black, queer, Indigenous, and Asian American perspectives. Exchanging the usual white, male “nuclear canon” for authors that include James Baldwin, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ruth Ozeki, Infrastructures of Apocalypse delivers a fresh literary history of post-1945 America that focuses on apocalypse from below. Here Hurley critiques the racialized urban spaces of civil defense and reads nuclear waste as a colonial weapon. Uniting these diverse lines of inquiry is Hurley’s belief that apocalyptic thinking is not the opposite of engagement but rather a productive way of imagining radically new forms of engagement. Infrastructures of Apocalypse offers futurelessness as a place from which we can construct a livable world. It fills a blind spot in scholarship on American literature of the nuclear age, while also offering provocative, surprising new readings of such well-known works as Atlas Shrugged, Infinite Jest, and Angels in America. Infrastructures of Apocalypse is a revelation for readers interested in nuclear issues, decolonial literature, speculative fiction, and American studies.

Throughout history, creative writers have often tackled topical subjects as a means to engage and influence public discourse. American authors—those born in the States and those who became naturalized citizens—have consistently found ways to be critical of the more painful pieces of the country’s past yet have done so with the patriotic purpose of strengthening the nation’s community and future. In History and Hope in American Literature: Models of Critical Patriotism, Ben Railton argues that it is only through an in-depth engagement with history—especially its darkest and most agonizing elements—that one can come to a genuine form of patriotism that employs constructive criticism as a tool for civic engagement. The author argues that it is through such critical patriotism that one can imagine and move toward a hopeful, shared future for all Americans. Railton highlights twelve works of American literature that focus on troubling periods in American history, including John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath,David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident, Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Dave Eggers’s What Is the What. From African and Native American histories to the Depression and the AIDS epidemic, Caribbean and Rwandan refugees and immigrants to global climate change, these works help readers confront, understand, and transcend the most sorrowful histories and issues. In so doing, the authors of these books offer hard-won hope that can help point people in the direction of a more perfect union. History and Hope in American Literature will be of interest to students and practitioners of American literature and history.

“Randy Shilts and Laurie Garrett told the story of the HIV/AIDS epidemic through the late 1980s and the early 1990s, respectively. Now journalist-historian-activist Emily Bass tells the story of US engagement in HIV/AIDS control in sub-Saharan Africa. There is far to go on the path, but Bass tells us how far we’ve come.” —Sten H. Vermund, professor and dean, Yale School of Public Health With his 2003 announcement of a program known as PEPFAR, George W. Bush launched an astonishingly successful American war against a global pandemic. PEPFAR played a key role in slashing HIV cases and AIDS deaths in sub-Saharan Africa, leading to the brink of epidemic control. Resilient in the face of flatlined funding and political headwinds, PEPFAR is America’s singular example of how to fight long-term plague—and win. To End a Plague is not merely the definitive history of this extraordinary program; it traces the lives of the activists who first impelled President Bush to take action, and later sought to prevent AIDS deaths at the whims of American politics. Moving from raucous street protests to the marbled halls of Washington and the clinics and homes where Ugandan people living with HIV fight to survive, it reveals an America that was once capable of real and meaningful change—and illuminates imperatives for future pandemic wars. Exhaustively researched and vividly written, this is the true story of an American moonshot.