Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
Novel Notions: Medical Discourse and the Mapping of the Imagination in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction
1st Edition
By Katherine E. Kickel
February 27, 2015
Medical, popular, and literary understanding about the imagination converged when Thomas Willis asserted that he had discovered the area of the brain that facilitated imagining. Taking this 'discovery' as paradigmatic, Novel Notions examines the reverberations of the medical investigation of the ...
Postmodern Tales of Slavery in the Americas: From Alejo Carpentier to Charles Johnson
1st Edition
By Timothy J. Cox
February 27, 2015
Unlike 19th century slave narratives, many recent novel-like texts about slavery deploy ironic narrative strategies, innovative structural features, and playful cruelty. This study analyzes the postmodern aesthetics common to seven tales of slavery from the United States, Martinique, and Guadeloupe...
Strange Cases: The Medical Case History and the British Novel
1st Edition
By Jason Tougaw
February 27, 2015
Strange Cases is the story of the mutual influence of the case history and the British novel during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Fictions from Defoe's Roxana to James's The Turn of the Screw and case histories from George Cheyne's to Sigmund Freud's have found narrative impetus in ...
Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Family and Sectionalism in the Virginia Novels of Kennedy, Caruthers, and Tucker, 1830-1845
1st Edition
By John L. Hare
February 05, 2015
First published in 2002. This work examines eight Virginia novels against the background of the political and social concerns of the Jacksonian years in which they were written, arguing that the authors used familial processes as a metaphor to discuss issues that they regarded as critical. Each ...
Museum Mediations: Reframing Ekphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry
1st Edition
By Barbara K. Fischer
December 22, 2014
This interdisciplinary study participates in the ongoing critical conversation about postwar American poetry and visual culture, while advancing that field into the arena of the museum. Turning to contemporary poems about the visual arts that foreground and interrogate a museum setting, the book ...
Through the Negative: The Photographic Image and the Written Word in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
1st Edition
By Megan Williams
December 01, 2014
The Civil War was the first 'image war', as photographs of the battlefields became the dominant means for capturing an epochal historical moment. At the same time, writers used the Civil War to present both their notions of nation and their ideas about the new intersections between photography and ...
Foreign Bodies: Trauma, Corporeality, and Textuality in Contemporary American Culture
1st Edition
By Laura Di Prete
November 10, 2014
Foreign Bodies investigates the relation between the notion of trauma and possible forms of representation within the necessary constraints that traumatic experience itself imposes. While many influential trauma theorists have focused on the notion of textual voice in their search for appropriate, ...
Intimate and Authentic Economies: The American Self-Made Man from Douglass to Chaplin
1st Edition
By Tom Nissley
November 10, 2014
The story of the American self-made man carries a perennial interest in American literature and cultural studies. This book expands the study of such stories to include the writings of Frederick Douglass, Horatio Alger, and James Weldon Johnson, and the work of silent comedians like Charlie Chaplin...
Unsettled Narratives: The Pacific Writings of Stevenson, Ellis, Melville and London
1st Edition
By David Farrier
November 10, 2014
In the nineteenth-century Pacific, the production of a text of encounter occurred in tandem with the production of a settled space; asserting settler presence through the control of the space and the context of the encounter. Indigenous resistance therefore took place through modes of ...
Different Dispatches: Journalism in American Modernist Prose
1st Edition
By David T. Humphries
September 11, 2014
In "Different Dispatches", David Humphries brings together in a new way a diverse group of well-known American writers of the inter-war period including: Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemmingway, Zora Neale Hurston, James Agee and Robert Penn Warren. He demonstrates how these writers ...
Overheard Voices: Address and Subjectivity in Postmodern American Poetry
1st Edition
By Ann Keniston
September 11, 2014
Overheard Voices examines poetic address and in particular apostrophe (the address of absent or inanimate others) in the work of four post-World War II American poets, with a focus on loss, desire, figuration, audience, and subjectivity. By approaching these crucial issues from an unexpected angle-...
Parsing the City: Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, and City Comedy's London as Language
1st Edition
By Heather Easterling
September 11, 2014
Parsing the City updates our understanding of Jacobean city comedy’s discursive role in its London society. Working with three major plays by Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, this book develops an updated reading of Jacobean city comedy as a dramatic subgenre whose ...