Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
Surviving the Crossing: (Im)migration, Ethnicity, and Gender in Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen
1st Edition
By Jessica Rabin
August 12, 2014
By examining the fiction of three women modernists--Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen--this book complicates binary paradigms of national, gender, and ethnic identities in the interwar period. In place of essentializing categories of identity, Jessica Rabin explores the liberating and ...
The Merchant of Modernism: The Economic Jew in Anglo-American Literature, 1864-1939
1st Edition
By Gary Levine
August 12, 2014
The Merchant of Modernism examines how the figure of the economic Jew symbolizes the struggle of authors from Dickens to Pound to reconcile their critique of capitalism with their own literary practices and how the shifting of the representations of this figure parallels the development of ...
You Factory Folks Who Sing This Song Will Surely Understand: Culture, Ideology, and Action in the Gastonia Novels of Myra Page, Grace Lumpkin, and Olive Dargin
1st Edition
By Wes Mantooth
August 12, 2014
First published in 2007. In early 1929, two organizers for the American Communist Party’s recently established National Textile Worker’s Union (NTWU) journeyed south by motorcycle to investigate the potential for beginning organizing work among textile workers in the Piedmont region. One of these ...
Poetry and Repetition: Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery
1st Edition
By Krystyna Mazur
July 17, 2014
This book examines the function of repetition in the work of Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery. All three poets extensively employ and comment upon the effects of repetition, yet represent three distinct poetics, considerably removed from one another in stylistic and historical terms....
Reading the Text That Isn't There: Paranoia in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
1st Edition
By Mike Davis
July 17, 2014
Through a careful examination of the work of the canonical nineteenth-century novelists, Mike Davis traces conspiracies and conspiratorial fantasy from one narrative site to another....
The Economy of the Short Story in British Periodicals of the 1890s
1st Edition
By Winnie Chan
July 17, 2014
This materialist study of the short story’s development in three diverse magazines reveals how, at the dawn of modernism, commercial pressures prompted modernist formal innovation in popular magazines, whilst anti-commercial opacity paradoxically formed the basis of an effective marketing strategy ...
Keeping up Her Geography: Women's Writing and Geocultural Space in Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture
1st Edition
By Tanya Ann Kennedy
July 03, 2014
Recently, literary critics and some historians have argued that to use the language of separate spheres is to "mistake fiction for reality." However, the tendency in this criticism is to ignore the work of feminist political theorists who argue that a range of ideologies of the public and private ...
Narrative in the Professional Age: Transatlantic Readings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and George Eliot
1st Edition
By Jennifer Cognard-Black
July 03, 2014
Challenging previous studies that claim anxiety and antagonism between transatlantic Victorian authors, Jennifer Cognard-Black uncovers a model of reciprocal influence among three of the most popular women writers of the era. Combining analyses of personal correspondence and print culture with ...
Rhizosphere: Gilles Deleuze and the 'Minor' American Writing of William James, W.E.B. Du Bois, Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, and William Falkner
1st Edition
By Mary Zamberlin
July 03, 2014
This book explores the significant intellectual impact the philosopher Jean Wahl had on the directions Gilles Deleuze took as a philosopher and writer of a philosophy of experimentation. The study of this influence also brings to light the significance of Deleuze's emphasis on la pragmatique, ...
Visionary Dreariness: Readings in Romanticism's Quotidian Sublime
1st Edition
By Markus Poetzsch
July 03, 2014
Visionary Dreariness: Readings in Romanticism’s Quotidian Sublime undertakes a reconceptualization of the theoretical and experiential framework of the Romantic sublime by shifting the focus from Burke’s and Kant’s prescriptions of natural vastness and grandeur to the narrower but no less wondrous ...
Authoring the Self: Self-Representation, Authorship, and the Print Market in British Poetry from Pope through Wordsworth
1st Edition
By Scott Hess
June 09, 2014
Drawing upon historicist and cultural studies approaches to literature, this book argues that the Romantic construction of the self emerged out of the growth of commercial print culture and the expansion and fragmentation of the reading public beginning in eighteenth-century Britain. Arguing for ...
Equity in English Renaissance Literature: Thomas More and Edmund Spenser
1st Edition
By Andrew Majeske
June 09, 2014
This book accounts for the previously inadequately explained transformation in the meaning of equity in sixteenth century England, a transformation which, intriguingly, first comes to light in literary texts rather than political or legal treatises. The book address the two principal literary works...