Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
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,...
Asian Diaspora Poetry in North America
1st Edition
By Benzi Zhang
December 09, 2011
Presenting a new way of reading that helps us discern some previously unnoticed or unnoticeable features of Asian diaspora poetry, this volume highlights how poetry plays a significant role in mediating and defining cross-cultural and transnational positions. Asian diaspora poetry in North America...
Writing the City: Urban Visions and Literary Modernism
1st Edition
By Desmond Harding
December 09, 2011
Writing the City examines and challenges the traditional transatlantic axis of urban modernism, London-Paris-New York, an axis that has often elided the historical importance of other centers that have shaped metropolitan identities and discourses. According to Desmond Harding, James Joyce's ...
Aesthetic Hysteria: The Great Neurosis in Victorian Melodrama and Contemporary Fiction
1st Edition
By Ankhi Mukherjee
November 16, 2011
Aesthetic Hysteria is a deconstructive psychoanalytic study of hysteria, using literary texts to foreground a telling encounter between two growing discourses within English studies: that of emotion/affect and trauma studies. It brings together several academic foci - the history of medicine, ...
The Politics of Identity in Irish Drama: W.B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory and J.M. Synge
1st Edition
By George Cusack
October 11, 2011
This study examines the early dramatic works of Yeats, Synge, and Gregory in the context of late colonial Ireland’s unique socio-political landscape. By contextualizing each author’s work within the artistic and political discourses of their time, Cusack demonstrates the complex negotiation of ...
Modern American Counter Writing: Beats, Outriders, Ethnics
1st Edition
By A. Robert Lee
May 16, 2011
The dissident voice in US culture might almost be said to have been born with the territory. Its span runs from Roger Williams to Thoreau, Anne Bradstreet to Gertrude Stein, Ambrose Bierce to the New Journalism, The Beats to the recent Bad Subjects cyber-crowd. In this new study, A. Robert Lee aims...
Haunting and Displacement in African American Literature and Culture
1st Edition
By Marisa Parham
January 06, 2011
Looking at texts including Jean Toomer’s Cane, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, James Baldwin’s Another Country, and Beat poetry by Bob Kaufmann, in this original study, Parham describes the phenomena of haunting, displacement, and ghostliness as endemic to modern African American literature and ...
Postmodernism and its Others: The Fiction of Ishmael Reed, Kathy Acker, and Don DeLillo
1st Edition
By Jeffrey Ebbeson
May 27, 2010
The book analyzes Ishmael Reed [Mumbo Jumbo], Kathy Acker [The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec], and Don Delillo [White Noise], three authors whom critics cite as quintessentially postmodern. For these critics such works possess formal narrative and/or content qualities at ...