Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
The Space and Place of Modernism: The Little Magazine in New York
1st Edition
By Adam McKible
December 11, 2013
This book examines reactions to the Russian Revolution by four little magazines of the teens and twenties (The Liberator, The Messenger, The Little Review, and The Dial) in order to analyze some of the ways modernist writers negotiate the competing demands of aesthetics, political commitment and ...
Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern
1st Edition
By William Slocombe
October 25, 2013
This book examines the relationship between nihilism and postmodernism in relation to the sublime, and is divided into three parts: history, theory, and praxis. Arguing against the simplistic division in literary criticism between nihilism and the sublime, the book demonstrates that both are ...
Vital Contact: Downclassing Journeys in American Literature from Melville to Richard Wright
1st Edition
By Patrick Chura
October 25, 2013
The book analyzes American literature about middle or upper class characters who voluntarily descend the class ranks to experience "vital contact" by living or associating, temporarily, with the poor. The motivations of these characters--and historical figures such as John Reed and Walter Wyckoff--...
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 ...