Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
City/Stage/Globe: Performance and Space in Shakespeare's London
1st Edition
By D.J. Hopkins
September 17, 2009
This interdisciplinary study theorizes the interaction of individual performance and social space. Examining three categories of space – the urban, the theatrical, and the cartographic – this volume considers the role of performance in the production and operation of these ...
Satire and the Postcolonial Novel: V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie
1st Edition
By John Clement Ball
July 09, 2009
Satire plays a prominent and often controversial role in postcolonial fiction. Satire and the Postcolonial Novel offers the first study of this topic, employing the insights of postcolonial comparative theories to revisit Western formulations of "satire" and the "satiric."...
Narrative Desire and Historical Reparations: A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie
1st Edition
By Timothy Gauthier
June 22, 2009
This book examines and explains the obsession with history in the contemporary British novel. It frames these historical novels as expressions of narrative desire, highlighting the reciprocal relationship between a desire to disclose and to rid ourselves of anxieties elicited by the past. ...
Between the Angle and the Curve: Mapping Gender, Race, Space, and Identity in Willa Cather and Toni Morrison
1st Edition
By Danielle Russell
June 16, 2009
In this study, Russell explores the ways in which Willa Cather and Toni Morrison subvert the textual expectations of gendered geography and push against the boundaries of the official canon. As Russell demonstrates, the unique depictions Cather and Morrison create of the American ...
Cosmopolitan Fictions: Ethics, Politics, and Global Change in the Works of Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Jamaica Kincaid, and J. M. Coetzee
1st Edition
By Katherine Stanton
June 16, 2009
Participating in the reframing of literary studies, Cosmopolitan Fictions identifies, as "cosmopolitan fiction", a genre of global literature that investigates the ethics and politics of complex and multiple belonging. The fictions studied by Katherine Stanton represent and revise the global ...
Feminist Utopian Novels of the 1970s: Joanna Russ and Dorothy Bryant
1st Edition
By Tatiana Teslenko
June 16, 2009
This book presents an exploration of the reinvented utopia that provided second-wave feminists of the 1970s with a conceptual space to articulate the politics of change. Tatiana Teslenko argues that utopian fiction of this decade offered a means of validating the personal as well as the political, ...
Fictional Feminism: How American Bestsellers Affect the Movement for Women's Equality
1st Edition
By Kim Loudermilk
June 16, 2009
This book focuses on the ways in which second-wave feminism has been represented in American popular culture, and on the effects that these representations have had on feminism as a political movement. Kim Loudermilk provides close readings of four best-selling novels and their film adaptations. ...
Labor Pains: Emerson, Hawthorne, & Alcott on Work, Women, & the Development of the Self
1st Edition
By Carolyn Maibor
June 16, 2009
This book explores the importance of work and its role in defining and developing the self. Maibor reveals how the writings of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Alcott delve into notions of equality through this emphasis on labor. In doing so she challenges the traditional view of Emerson as unconcerned with...
Postmodern Counternarratives: Irony and Audience in the Novels of Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Charles Johnson, and Tim O'Brien
1st Edition
By Christopher Donovan
June 16, 2009
This book provides a wide-ranging discussion of realism, postmodernism, literary theory and popular fiction before focusing on the careers of four prominent novelists. Despite wildly contrasting ambitions and agendas, all four grow progressively more sympathetic to the expectations of a mainstream ...
The Colonizer Abroad: Island Representations in American Prose from Herman Melville to Jack London
1st Edition
By Christopher McBride
June 16, 2009
Looking at a diverse series of authors--Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Mark Twain, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Jack London--The Colonizer Abroad claims that as the U.S. emerged as a colonial power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the literature of the sea became a literature ...
The Fiction of Nationality in an Era of Transnationalism
1st Edition
By Nyla Ali Khan
June 16, 2009
The book focuses on the representation of South Asian life in works by four Anglophone writers: V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Anita Desai. Concentrating on the intertwined topics of nationalism, transnationalism, and fundamentalism, the book addresses the dislocation associated ...
The Life Writing of Otherness: Woolf, Baldwin, Kingston, and Winterson
1st Edition
By Lauren Rusk
June 16, 2009
Focusing on innovative works by Woolf, Baldwin, Kingston and Winterson, the author analyzes how they each represent the self as unique, collectively "other," and inclusively human, and how these conflicting aspects of selfhood interact....