Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
Allegories of Violence: Tracing the Writings of War in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction
1st Edition
By Lidia Yuknavitch
January 16, 2014
Allegories of Violence demilitarizes the concept of war and asks what would happen if we understood war as discursive via late 20th Century novels of war....
Making of the Victorian Novelist: Anxieties of Authorship in the Mass Market
1st Edition
By Bradley Deane
January 16, 2014
This book examines a sequence of crises in nineteenth-century print culture and offers an original narrative of what it meant to be a Victorian novelist. Easily dismissed at the beginning of the century as hacks who pandered to the ignorant or indolent, novelists by the end of Victoria's reign ...
Border Modernism
1st Edition
By Christopher Schedler
January 14, 2014
Reorienting the field of American literary modernism, Christopher Schedler defines an intercultural form of representation termed border modernism that challenges the aesthetic hegemony of metropolitan (high) modernism. In this study, Schedler compares the works of European and Anglo-American ...
Ethical Diversions: The Post-Holocaust Narratives of Pynchon, Abish, DeLillo, and Spiegelman
1st Edition
By Katalin Orban
January 14, 2014
First Published in 2005. This study focuses on a group of related texts which have struggled to rescue, rather than eliminate, the paradox of answering the original question: Why ethics rather than nothing?...
Poetic Gesture: Myth, Wallace Stevens, and the Desirous Motions of Poetic Language
1st Edition
By Kristine S. Santilli
January 14, 2014
This study addresses the problem of meaning as it is conveyed by poetic language, attempting to move beyond some of the obstacles and boundaries of contemporary critical approaches. By providing a phenomenological context, and through a theoretical contemplation of certain myths as embodiments of ...
Protest and the Body in Melville, Dos Passos, and Hurston
1st Edition
By Thomas McGlamery
January 14, 2014
This book analyzes the work of Herman Melville, John Dos Passos, and Zora Neale Hurston alongside biographical materials and discourses on the body. Thomas McGlamery views each of these authors' literary output as an effort to "work through" the political meanings associated with the body, ...
Racial Blasphemies: Religious Irreverence and Race in American Literature
1st Edition
By Michael L. Cobb
January 14, 2014
Racial Blasphemies, using critical race theory and literary analysis, charts the tense, frustrated religious language that saturates much twentieth-century American literature. Michael Cobb argues that we should consider religious language as a special kind of language - a language of curse words -...
The Self Wired: Technology and Subjectivity in Contemporary Narrative
1st Edition
By Lisa Yaszek
January 14, 2014
First Published in 2002. Advanced technologies challenge conventional understandings of the human subject by transforming the body into a conduit between external forces and the internal psyche. This title discusses the intense controversy about how to best understand and represent human ...
Love American Style: Divorce and the American Novel, 1881-1976
1st Edition
By Kimberly Freeman
December 11, 2013
A popular subject in sociology and cultural studies, divorce has until recently been overlooked by literary critics. Spanning nearly a century during which the divorce rate skyrocketed, Love American Style traces the treatment of divorce in the American novel. This book draws upon popular, ...
The Space and Place of Modernism: The Little Magazine in New York
1st Edition
By Adam McKible
December 11, 2013
This book examines reactions to the Russian Revolution by four little magazines of the teens and twenties (The Liberator, The Messenger, The Little Review, and The Dial) in order to analyze some of the ways modernist writers negotiate the competing demands of aesthetics, political commitment and ...
Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern
1st Edition
By William Slocombe
October 25, 2013
This book examines the relationship between nihilism and postmodernism in relation to the sublime, and is divided into three parts: history, theory, and praxis. Arguing against the simplistic division in literary criticism between nihilism and the sublime, the book demonstrates that both are ...
Vital Contact: Downclassing Journeys in American Literature from Melville to Richard Wright
1st Edition
By Patrick Chura
October 25, 2013
The book analyzes American literature about middle or upper class characters who voluntarily descend the class ranks to experience "vital contact" by living or associating, temporarily, with the poor. The motivations of these characters--and historical figures such as John Reed and Walter Wyckoff--...