Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
Cosmopolitan Fictions: Ethics, Politics, and Global Change in the Works of Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Jamaica Kincaid, and J. M. Coetzee
1st Edition
By Katherine Stanton
June 16, 2009
Participating in the reframing of literary studies, Cosmopolitan Fictions identifies, as "cosmopolitan fiction", a genre of global literature that investigates the ethics and politics of complex and multiple belonging. The fictions studied by Katherine Stanton represent and revise the global ...
Feminist Utopian Novels of the 1970s: Joanna Russ and Dorothy Bryant
1st Edition
By Tatiana Teslenko
June 16, 2009
This book presents an exploration of the reinvented utopia that provided second-wave feminists of the 1970s with a conceptual space to articulate the politics of change. Tatiana Teslenko argues that utopian fiction of this decade offered a means of validating the personal as well as the political, ...
Fictional Feminism: How American Bestsellers Affect the Movement for Women's Equality
1st Edition
By Kim Loudermilk
June 16, 2009
This book focuses on the ways in which second-wave feminism has been represented in American popular culture, and on the effects that these representations have had on feminism as a political movement. Kim Loudermilk provides close readings of four best-selling novels and their film adaptations. ...
Labor Pains: Emerson, Hawthorne, & Alcott on Work, Women, & the Development of the Self
1st Edition
By Carolyn Maibor
June 16, 2009
This book explores the importance of work and its role in defining and developing the self. Maibor reveals how the writings of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Alcott delve into notions of equality through this emphasis on labor. In doing so she challenges the traditional view of Emerson as unconcerned with...
Postmodern Counternarratives: Irony and Audience in the Novels of Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Charles Johnson, and Tim O'Brien
1st Edition
By Christopher Donovan
June 16, 2009
This book provides a wide-ranging discussion of realism, postmodernism, literary theory and popular fiction before focusing on the careers of four prominent novelists. Despite wildly contrasting ambitions and agendas, all four grow progressively more sympathetic to the expectations of a mainstream ...
The Colonizer Abroad: Island Representations in American Prose from Herman Melville to Jack London
1st Edition
By Christopher McBride
June 16, 2009
Looking at a diverse series of authors--Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Mark Twain, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Jack London--The Colonizer Abroad claims that as the U.S. emerged as a colonial power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the literature of the sea became a literature ...
The Fiction of Nationality in an Era of Transnationalism
1st Edition
By Nyla Ali Khan
June 16, 2009
The book focuses on the representation of South Asian life in works by four Anglophone writers: V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Anita Desai. Concentrating on the intertwined topics of nationalism, transnationalism, and fundamentalism, the book addresses the dislocation associated ...
The Life Writing of Otherness: Woolf, Baldwin, Kingston, and Winterson
1st Edition
By Lauren Rusk
June 16, 2009
Focusing on innovative works by Woolf, Baldwin, Kingston and Winterson, the author analyzes how they each represent the self as unique, collectively "other," and inclusively human, and how these conflicting aspects of selfhood interact....
The Politics of Melancholy from Spenser to Milton
1st Edition
By Adam Kitzes
June 16, 2009
During the so-called Age of Melancholy, many writers invoked both traditional and new conceptualizations of the disease in order to account for various types of social turbulence, ranging from discontent and factionalism to civil war. Writing about melancholy became a way to explore both the causes...
The Spell Cast by Remains: The Myth of Wilderness in Modern American Literature
1st Edition
By Patricia Ross
June 16, 2009
Examining the constituting mechanism of the American wilderness myth in Modern American literature, Patricia Ross probes the various purposes for which 'wilderness' is constructed. Considering the work of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Cather, she states that the idea of wilderness is just that, an idea,...
The Subject of Race in American Science Fiction
1st Edition
By Sharon DeGraw
June 16, 2009
While the connections between science fiction and race have largely been neglected by scholars, racial identity is a key element of the subjectivity constructed in American SF. In his Mars series, Edgar Rice Burroughs primarily supported essentialist constructions of racial identity, but also ...
Wilderness City: The Post-War American Urban Novel from Nelson Algren to John Edger Wideman
1st Edition
By Ted Clontz
June 16, 2009
The books seeks to examine changes in the U.S.--literary, aesthetic, and social--as represented in novels set in an environment where the gamut of ethnicities and their often differing views of literature and culture that make up the U.S. are more generally found, using the theories and concepts of...