Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
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 ...
The Fatal News: Reading and Information Overload in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature
1st Edition
By Katherine E. Ellison
September 11, 2014
What was "information" in the early eighteenth century, and what influence did the emergence of information, as potential physical and psychological threat, have on readers of the period? Recent scholarship in eighteenth-century print culture and in twenty-first-century media studies and theory ...
The Figure of Consciousness: William James, Henry James and Edith Wharton
1st Edition
By Jill M. Kress
September 11, 2014
Through analysis of metaphors of consciousness in the philosophy and fiction of William James, Henry James and Edith Wharton, this work traces the significance of representations of knowledge, gender and social class, revealing how writers conceived of the self in modern literature....
The Metanarrative of Suspicion in Late Twentieth-Century America
1st Edition
By Sandra Baringer
September 11, 2014
Narratives of suspicion and mistrust have escaped the boundaries of specific sites of discourse to constitue a metanarrative that pervades American culture. Sandra Baringer investigates this phenomenon....
The Rise of Corporate Publishing and Its Effects on Authorship in Early Twentieth Century America
1st Edition
By Kim Becnel
September 11, 2014
This study examines the way that the modernization and incorporation of the American publishing industry in the early twentieth century both helped to foment the emerging late industrial cultural hierarchy and capitalized on that same hierarchy to increase readership and profits. More importantly, ...
The Romantic Sublime and Middle-Class Subjectivity in the Victorian Novel
1st Edition
By Stephen Hancock
September 11, 2014
This study follows the aesthetic of the sublime from Burke and Kant, through Wordsworth and the Shelleys, into Thackeray, Dickens, Eliot and Hardy. Exploring the continuities between the romantic and Victorian periods that have so often been rather read as differences, the book demonstrates that ...
Machine and Metaphor: The Ethics of Language in American Realism
1st Edition
By Jennifer C. Cook
August 12, 2014
American literary realism burgeoned during a period of tremendous technological innovation. Because the realists evinced not only a fascination with this new technology but also an ethos that seems to align itself with science, many have paired the two fields rather unproblematically. But this book...
Revisiting Vietnam
1st Edition
By Julia Bleakney
August 12, 2014
This book explores the memorializing practices of American veterans of the Vietnam War at several of the most significant contemporary sites of memory in the United States and Vietnam. These sites include veterans' memoirs, museum exhibits, replicas of the National Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and ...