Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
Zionism and Revolution in European-Jewish Literature
1st Edition
By Laurel Plapp
May 14, 2013
Zionism and Revolution in European-Jewish Literature examines twentieth-century Jewish writing that challenges imperialist ventures and calls for solidarity with the colonized, most notably the Arabs of Palestine and Africans in the Americas. Since Edward Said defined orientalism in 1978 as a ...
Voice of the Oppressed in the Language of the Oppressor: A Discussion of Selected Postcolonial Literature from Ireland, Africa and America
1st Edition
By Patsy J. Daniels
May 03, 2013
This book examines works from twelve authors from colonized cultures who write in English: William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Chinua Achebe, Maxine Hong Kinston, Amy Tan, Toni Morrison, Alic Walker, Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, Louise Erdrich, and Leslie Marmon Silko. The book fins...
Masculinity and the English Working Class: Studies in Victorian Autobiography and Fiction
1st Edition
By Ying Lee
March 21, 2013
This book examines representations of working-class masculine subjectivity in Victorian autobiography and fiction. In it, Ying focuses on ideas of domesticity and the male body and demonstrates that working-class masculinities differ substantially from those of the widely studied upper classes...
Literature and Development in North Africa: The Modernizing Mission
1st Edition
By Perri Giovannucci
November 14, 2012
The book examines how modern global development largely privileges Western multinational interests at the expense of local or indigenous concerns in the "developing" nations of the East. The practices of development have mostly led not to economic, social, and political progressivism in local ...
The Genesis of the Chicago Renaissance: Theodore Dreiser, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and James T. Farrell
1st Edition
By Mary Hricko
October 10, 2012
This study examines the genesis of Chicago's two identified literary renaissance periods (1890-1920 and 1930-1950) through the writings of Dreiser, Hughes, Wright, and Farrell. The relationship of these four writers demonstrates a continuity of thought between the two renaissance periods. By noting...
The Contemporary Anglophone Travel Novel: The Aesthetics of Self-Fashioning in the Era of Globalization
1st Edition
By Stephen M. Levin
August 30, 2012
The Contemporary Anglophone Travel Novel explores the themes of alienation and displacement in a genre of post-World War II novels that portrays the pursuit of an authentic travel experience in a culturally unfamiliar place. Levin explores two questions: why does travel to an "undiscovered" ...
Gendered Pathologies: The Female Body and Biomedical Discourse in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel
1st Edition
By Sondra Archimedes
July 27, 2012
Gendered Pathologies examines nineteenth-century literary representations of the pathologized female body in relation to biomedical discourses about gender and society in Victorian England. According to medical and scientific views of the period, the woman who did not conform to the dictates of ...
Between Profits and Primitivism: Shaping White Middle-Class Masculinity in the U.S., 1880-1917
1st Edition
By Athena Devlin
June 21, 2012
Between 1800 and the First World War, white middle-class men were depicted various forms of literature as weak and nervous. This book explores cultural writings dedicated to the physical and mental health of the male subject, showing that men have mobilized gender constructions repeatedly and ...
Modernism and the Marketplace: Literary Culture and Consumer Capitalism in Rhys, Woolf, Stein, and Nella Larsen
1st Edition
By Alissa G. Karl
May 09, 2012
Though the relationship of modernist writers and artists to mass-marketplaces and popular cultural forms is often understood as one of ambivalence if not antagonism, Modernism and the Marketplace redirects this established line of inquiry, considering the practical and conceptual interfaces between...
Victorian Narrative Technologies in the Middle East
1st Edition
By Cara Murray
March 13, 2012
Victorian Narrative Technologies tells the story of how the British, who wanted nothing to do with the Suez Canal during the decades in which it was being internationally planned and invested, came to own it. It stands to reason that the nation that prided itself on its engineering prowess and had ...
Spaces of the Sacred and Profane: Dickens, Trollope, and the Victorian Cathedral Town
1st Edition
By Elizabeth A. Bridgham
February 24, 2012
This study examines the unique cultural space of Victorian cathedral towns as they appear in the literary work of Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope, arguing that Dickens and Trollope use the cathedral town’s enclosure, and its overt connections between sacred and secular, present and past, as an...
Ruined by Design: Shaping Novels and Gardens in the Culture of Sensibility
1st Edition
By Inger Sigrun Brodey
February 23, 2012
By examining the motif of ruination in a variety of late-eighteenth-century domains, this book portrays the moral aesthetic of the culture of sensibility in Europe, particularly its negotiation of the demands of tradition and pragmatism alongside utopian longings for authenticity, natural goodness,...