Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
Beyond the Sound Barrier: The Jazz Controversy in Twentieth-Century American Fiction
1st Edition
By Kristin K Henson
March 03, 2016
Beyond the Sound Barrier examines twentieth-century fictional representations of popular music-particularly jazz-in the fiction of James Weldon Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, and Toni Morrison. Kristin K. Henson argues that an analysis of musical tropes in the work of these four ...
The Dialectic of Self and Story: Reading and Storytelling in Contemporary American Fiction
1st Edition
By Robert Durante
February 29, 2016
Informed by selected postmodern theories and cultural criticism, this study argues that while American fiction of the 1980s and 1990s bears the outward signs of a return to realism, it also evidences recurring themes of postmodernism, such as alienation, social disintegration, personal despair, ...
Divergent Visions, Contested Spaces: The Early United States through Lens of Travel
1st Edition
By Jeffrey Hotz
December 07, 2015
This multicultural project examines fictional and non-fictional accounts of travel in the Early Republic and antebellum periods. Connecting literary representations of geographic spaces within and outside of U.S. borders to evolving definitions of national American identity, the book explores ...
The Self in the Cell: Narrating the Victorian Prisoner
1st Edition
By Sean C. Grass
November 27, 2015
Michel Foucault's writing about the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish has dominated discussions of the prison and the novel, and recent literary criticism draws heavily from Foucauldian ideas about surveillance to analyze metaphorical forms of confinement: policing, detection, and public scrutiny...
Female Embodiment and Subjectivity in the Modernist Novel: The Corporeum of Virginia Woolf and Olive Moore
1st Edition
By Renée Dickinson
November 03, 2015
This study considers the work of two experimental British women modernists writing in the tumultuous interwar period--Virginia Woolf and Olive Moore--by examining four crucial incarnations of female embodiment and subjectivity: female bodies, geographical imagery, national ideology and textual...
Out of Touch: Skin Tropes and Identities in Woolf, Ellison, Pynchon, and Acker
1st Edition
By Maureen F. Curtin
July 20, 2015
Out of Touch investigates how skin has become a crucial but disavowed figure in twentieth-century literature, theory, and cultural criticism. These discourses reveal the extent to which skin figures in the cultural effect of changes in visual technologies, a development argued by critics to be at ...
Depression Glass: Documentary Photography and the Medium of the Camera-Eye in Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, and William Carlos Williams
1st Edition
By Monique Vescia
June 08, 2015
This interdisciplinary study examines the interrelations between the documentary poetics of "Objectivism" in the United States during the 1930s. Focusing on three volumes published by the Objectivist Press in 1934--Charles Reznikoff's Testimony, George Oppen's Discrete Series, and William Carlos ...
Urban Revelations: Cities, Homes, and Other Ruins in American Literature, 1790-1860
1st Edition
By Donald J. McNutt
June 08, 2015
This study reexamines the ethos of national progress by analyzing how American writers import images of ruins from European aesthetics to cast the city as a site of instability and cultural impermanence. While highlighting the transatlantic currency of ruin imagery, the study demonstrates through ...
The Real Negro: The Question of Authenticity in Twentieth-Century African American Literature
1st Edition
By Shelly Eversley
May 21, 2015
In this book, Shelly Eversley historicizes the demand for racial authenticity - what Zora Neale Hurston called 'the real Negro' - in twentieth-century American literature. Eversley argues that the modern emergence of the interest in 'the real Negro' transforms the question of what race an author ...
Dead Letters to the New World: Melville, Emerson, and American Transcendentalism
1st Edition
By Michael McLoughlin
April 23, 2015
This book contextualises and details Herman Melville's artistic career and outlines the relationship between Melville and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Michael McLoughlin divides Melville's professional career as a novelist into two major phases corresponding to the growth and shift in his art. In the ...
Negotiating Copyright: Authorship and the Discourse of Literary Property Rights in Nineteenth-Century America
1st Edition
By Martin T. Buinicki
April 23, 2015
This book examines how debates over copyright law in the United States during the nineteenth century, particularly over the lack of an international copyright law, intersected with the business practices and political and artistic beliefs of American authors. These debates shaped a discourse of ...
Segregated Miscegenation: On the Treatment of Racial Hybridity in the North American and Latin American Literary Traditions
1st Edition
By Carlos Hiraldo
April 23, 2015
Through the comparative study of literatures from the United States and Latin America, Segregated Miscegenation questions received notions of race and nation. Carlos Hiraldo examines the current understanding of race in the United States alongside alternative models of racial self-definition in ...