Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
Figures of Finance Capitalism: Writing, Class and Capital in Mid-Victorian Narratives
1st Edition
By Borislav Knezevic
January 17, 2019
Figures of Finance Capitalism brings into focus Victorian narratives by major middle-class writers in which the workings of finance capitalism are prominently featured, and reads this interest in finance capitalism in the context of middle-class misgivings about a class system still dominated by a ...
Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry
1st Edition
By John Wrighton
August 23, 2018
From the Objectivists to e-poetry, this thoughtful and innovative book explores the dynamic relationship between the ethical imperative and poetic practice, revitalizing the study of the most prominent post-war American poets in a fresh, provocative way. Contributing to the "turn to ethics" in ...
The Dangerous Potential of Reading: Readers & the Negotiation of Power in Selected Nineteenth-Century Narratives
1st Edition
By Ana-Isabel Aliaga-Buchenau
November 18, 2016
The development of a mass readership, a mass market for books, and a prominent status of reading and readers is reflected in the central role of literacy, reading, and books in the lives of protagonists in nineteenth-century American and French literature. In this book, Ana-Isabel Aliaga-Buchenau ...
Misery's Mathematics: Mourning, Compensation, and Reality in Antebellum American Literature
1st Edition
By Peter Balaam
July 29, 2016
This book reveals the strain of a moment in American cultural history that led several remarkable writers -- including Emerson, Warner, and Melville -- to render the stark rupture of loss in innovative ways. Pushing Protestant culture's sense of loss into secular terrain, these three key ...
Artful Itineraries: European Art and American Careers in High Culture, 1865-1920
1st Edition
By Paul Fisher
July 21, 2016
This study investigates the paradoxical dynamics of American high culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by examining the strategies of Americans who wrote about European art in order to promote and legitimize literary careers. Contrary to the myths they themselves ...
Dissenting Fictions: Identity and Resistance in the Contemporary American Novel
1st Edition
By Cathy Moses
July 21, 2016
This study elucidates the relationship between identity formation and resistance to racial and sexual oppression in a group of contemporary American novels the author terms dissenting fictions, narratives that assert the subjectivity and historicity of marginalized peoples at precisely the moment ...
Transatlantic Engagements with the British Eighteenth Century
1st Edition
By Pamela J. Albert
July 18, 2016
Transatlantic Engagements with the British Eighteenth Century revisits eighteenth-century cultural artifacts through the lens of creative works produced by contemporary writers Beryl Gilroy (Guyana), Derek Walcott (St. Lucia), Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), and David Dabydeen (Guyana). While early studies...
Word of Mouth: Food and Fiction After Freud
1st Edition
By Susanne M. Skubal
July 18, 2016
An examination of the importance of oral experience as reflected in literature, Word of Mouth extends psychoanalytic theory as forwarded by Freud, Karl Abraham, Melanie Klein, and Julia Kristeva. The meaning of oral experience is explored with reference to several texts, looking at the oral bond ...
A Coincidence of Wants: The Novel and Neoclassical Economics
1st Edition
By Charles Lewis
May 18, 2016
This interdisciplinary study examines four major British and American novels in view of key concepts from the mainstream tradition of neoclassical economics. Studies of the novel widely address its connections to capitalism, yet literary critics and theorists rarely make reference to neoclassical ...
Embodying Beauty: Twentieth-Century American Women Writers' Aesthetics
1st Edition
By Malin Pereira
May 13, 2016
This study argues that twentieth-century American women writers' textual representations of female beauty generally recognize a link between beauty standards and aesthetic ideology, exploring female beauty as a symptom of prevailing ideas about art and esthetics. Female beauty, in their texts, is ...
Making Homes in the West/Indies: Constructions of Subjectivity in the Writings of Michelle Cliff and Jamaica Kincaid
1st Edition
By Antonia Macdonald-Smythe
May 13, 2016
This study focuses on the ways in which two of the most prominent Caribbean women writers residing in the United States, Michelle Cliff and Jamaica Kincaid, have made themselves at home within Caribbean poetics, even as their migration to the United States affords them participation and acceptance ...
Modern Primitives: Race and Language in Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Zora Neale Hurston
1st Edition
By Susanna Pavloska
April 27, 2016
This book explores the ways in which the American writers Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Zora Neale Hurston used modernist primitivism to assert a uniquely American literary identity in the face of European cultural hegemony.The extended Introduction traces the history of primitivism from a ...