Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
Modern American Counter Writing: Beats, Outriders, Ethnics
1st Edition
By A. Robert Lee
May 16, 2011
The dissident voice in US culture might almost be said to have been born with the territory. Its span runs from Roger Williams to Thoreau, Anne Bradstreet to Gertrude Stein, Ambrose Bierce to the New Journalism, The Beats to the recent Bad Subjects cyber-crowd. In this new study, A. Robert Lee aims...
Haunting and Displacement in African American Literature and Culture
1st Edition
By Marisa Parham
January 06, 2011
Looking at texts including Jean Toomer’s Cane, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, James Baldwin’s Another Country, and Beat poetry by Bob Kaufmann, in this original study, Parham describes the phenomena of haunting, displacement, and ghostliness as endemic to modern African American literature and ...
Postmodernism and its Others: The Fiction of Ishmael Reed, Kathy Acker, and Don DeLillo
1st Edition
By Jeffrey Ebbeson
May 27, 2010
The book analyzes Ishmael Reed [Mumbo Jumbo], Kathy Acker [The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec], and Don Delillo [White Noise], three authors whom critics cite as quintessentially postmodern. For these critics such works possess formal narrative and/or content qualities at ...
Idioms of Self Interest: Credit, Identity, and Property in English Renaissance Literature
1st Edition
By Jill Phillips Ingram
December 17, 2009
Idioms of Self-Interest uncovers an emerging social integration of economic self-interest in early modern England by examining literary representations of credit relationships in which individuals are both held to standards of communal trust and rewarded for risk-taking enterprise. Drawing on women...
Conspiracy, Revolution, and Terrorism from Victorian Fiction to the Modern Novel
1st Edition
By Adrian Wisnicki
December 07, 2009
Drawing on critical and theoretical work by Miller, Boone, Foucault, Jameson, and others, as well as cultural history, affect theory, and contemporary psychiatric literature, the author defines and explores what he calls the Victorian "conspiracy narrative tradition"--a tradition which embraces ...
Race, Immigration, and American Identity in the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, Ralph Ellison, and William Faulkner
1st Edition
By Randy Boyagoda
December 07, 2009
Salman Rushdie once observed that William Faulkner was the writer most frequently cited by third world authors as their major influence. Inspired by the unexpected lines of influence and sympathy that Rushdie’s statement implied, this book seeks to understand connections between American and global...
Shakespeare and the Cultural Colonization of Ireland
1st Edition
By Robin Bates
October 21, 2009
Focusing on plays (Richard II, Henry V, and Hamlet) which appear prominently in the writing of the Irish nationalist movement of the early twentieth century, this study explores how Irish writers such as Sean O’Casey, Samuel Beckett, W. B. Yeats, G. B. Shaw, James Joyce, and Seamus Heaney resisted ...
Novels, Maps, Modernity: The Spatial Imagination, 1850–2000
1st Edition
By Eric Bulson
September 30, 2009
"Novels, Maps, Modernity is a remarkable book that promises to transform our knowledge of the representation of space in modern fiction." - Brian Richardson, University of Maryland "Bulson’s informative book maps out the territory and points the way to further research and discovery." - Ian Pindar...
City/Stage/Globe: Performance and Space in Shakespeare's London
1st Edition
By D.J. Hopkins
September 17, 2009
This interdisciplinary study theorizes the interaction of individual performance and social space. Examining three categories of space – the urban, the theatrical, and the cartographic – this volume considers the role of performance in the production and operation of these ...
Satire and the Postcolonial Novel: V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie
1st Edition
By John Clement Ball
July 09, 2009
Satire plays a prominent and often controversial role in postcolonial fiction. Satire and the Postcolonial Novel offers the first study of this topic, employing the insights of postcolonial comparative theories to revisit Western formulations of "satire" and the "satiric."...
Narrative Desire and Historical Reparations: A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie
1st Edition
By Timothy Gauthier
June 22, 2009
This book examines and explains the obsession with history in the contemporary British novel. It frames these historical novels as expressions of narrative desire, highlighting the reciprocal relationship between a desire to disclose and to rid ourselves of anxieties elicited by the past. ...
Between the Angle and the Curve: Mapping Gender, Race, Space, and Identity in Willa Cather and Toni Morrison
1st Edition
By Danielle Russell
June 16, 2009
In this study, Russell explores the ways in which Willa Cather and Toni Morrison subvert the textual expectations of gendered geography and push against the boundaries of the official canon. As Russell demonstrates, the unique depictions Cather and Morrison create of the American ...