Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
Death, Men, and Modernism: Trauma and Narrative in British Fiction from Hardy to Woolf
1st Edition
By Ariela Freedman
October 23, 2013
Death, Men and Modernism argues that the figure of the dead man becomes a locus of attention and a symptom of crisis in British writing of the early to mid-twentieth century. While Victorian writers used dying women to dramatize aesthetic, structural, and historical concerns, modernist novelists ...
Outsider Citizens: The Remaking of Postwar Identity in Wright, Beauvoir, and Baldwin
1st Edition
By Sarah Relyea
October 23, 2013
Outsider Citizens examines a foundational moment in the writing of race, gender, and sexuality––the decade after 1945, when Richard Wright, Simone de Beauvoir, and others sought to adapt existentialism and psychoanalysis to the representation of newly emerging public identities. Relyea offers the ...
Twentieth-Century Americanism: Identity and Ideology in Depression-Era Leftist Literature
1st Edition
By Andrew Yerkes
October 23, 2013
The main purpose of the book is to expand the scope of revisionary studies of the thirties by analyzing novels using recent innovations in critical theory. The book adds to the research of Barbara Foley, Michael Denning, Alan Wald, and others who have challenged Cold-War-era accounts of the ...
Balancing the Books: Faulkner, Morrison and the Economies of Slavery
1st Edition
By Erik Dussere
September 03, 2013
Balancing the Books represents a sophisticated examination of the ongoing engagement of American literature with the economies of slavery through the works of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison. Both Faulkner and Morrison write about the relationship between race, identity, and history, and about ...
Eugenic Fantasies: Racial Ideology in the Literature and Popular Culture of the 1920's
1st Edition
By Betsy Lee Nies
September 03, 2013
Eugenic Fantasies is an innovative work that combines interpretive strategies from the fields of psychoanalysis, anthropology, and literary studies to create a new model for theorizing race....
From Within the Frame: Storytelling in African-American Studies
1st Edition
By Bertram D. Ashe
September 03, 2013
The book explores the written representation of African-American oral storytelling from Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison to James Alan McPherson, Toni Cade Bambara and John Edgar Wideman. At its core, the book compares the relationship of the "frame tale"-an inside-the-text ...
Narrative Mutations: Discourses of Heredity and Caribbean Literature
1st Edition
By Rudyard Alcocer
September 03, 2013
Given the welcomed shift throughout the academy away from essentialist and biologically fixed understandings of "race" and the body, it is a curiosity worth exploring that so many sophisticated-and even radical-narratives retain physical and behavioral heredity as a guiding trope. The persistence ...
Regenerating the Novel: Gender and Genre in Woolf, Forster, Sinclair, and Lawrence
1st Edition
By James J. Miracky
September 03, 2013
In this exploration of the most innovative and iconoclastic modernist fiction, James J. Miracky studies the ways in which cultural forces and discourses of gender inflect the practice and theory of four British novelists: Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, May Sinclair, and D. H. Lawrence. Building on ...
The End of the Mind: The Edge of the Intelligible in Hardy, Stevens, Larking, Plath, and Gluck
1st Edition
By DeSales Harrison
September 03, 2013
This book seeks to include among accounts of modern lyric poetry a theory of the poem's relation to the unintelligible. DeSales Harrison draws a distinction between sites of unintelligibility and sights of difficulty; while much has been said about modernist difficulty, little has been said about ...
The Ethics of Exile: Colonialism in the Fictions of Charles Brockden Brown and J.M. Coetzee
1st Edition
By Timothy Strode
August 21, 2013
The book investigates the problem of how narrative, normally conceived of temporally, encodes its relation to space, especially the territorial space that is the subject of colonial possession and dispossession. The book approaches this problem by, first, providing a theoretical framework derived ...
The Imperial Quest and Modern Memory from Conrad to Greene
1st Edition
By Julia Rawa
August 21, 2013
The Imperial Quest and Modern Memory explores relationships between narrative and imperium in the context of Western Modernism by examining the Quest as a vexed trope in Heart of Darkness, Passage to India, The Sheltering Sky, and The Quiet American. The book takes stock of twentieth century theory...
Negotiating the Modern: Orientalism and Indianness in the Anglophone World
1st Edition
By Amit Ray
May 14, 2013
This book explicates long-standing literary celebrations of 'India' and 'Indian-ness' by charting a cultural history of Indianness in the Anglophone world, locating moments (in intellectual, religious and cultural history) where India and Indianness are offered up as solutions to modern moral, ...