Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion’s Novels: Exiled from Eden
1st Edition
By Katarzyna Nowak McNeice
September 30, 2020
California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion’s Novels: Exiled from Eden focuses on the concept of Californian identity in the fiction of Joan Didion. This identity is understood as melancholic, in the sense that the critics following the tradition of both Sigmund Freud and ...
Making and Seeing Modern Texts
1st Edition
By Jonathan Locke Hart
September 30, 2020
Making and Seeing Modern Texts explores the poetics of texts through a close reading and analysis across the genres of poetry, drama, fiction, non-fiction travel literature and theory. This volume demonstrates that prose, as much as poetry, share the making and seeing of language, literary practice...
The Pictorial Third: An Essay Into Intermedial Criticism
1st Edition
By Liliane Louvel
September 30, 2020
The Pictorial Third: An Essay into Intermedial Criticism examines the extent to which poetry intertwines with painting and the visual at large, and studies the singular relationship established between language and image, observesing the modalities and workings of what is termed ‘intermedial ...
Cultural Evolution and its Discontents: Cognitive Overload, Parasitic Cultures, and the Humanistic Cure
1st Edition
By Robert Watson
January 14, 2020
People worry that computers, robots, interstellar aliens, or Satan himself – brilliant, stealthy, ruthless creatures – may seize control of our world and destroy what’s uniquely valuable about the human race. Cultural Evolution and its Discontents shows that our cultural systems – especially those ...
Revised Lives: Whitman, Religion, and Constructions of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Culture
1st Edition
By William Pannapacker
December 10, 2019
Revised Lives examines self-representation in U.S. culture from the American Revolution through the nineteenth century. Drawing on studies of the history of the book, Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, and ethnic and gender revisionism, this book focuses on the processes of national development, the ...
Figures of Finance Capitalism: Writing, Class and Capital in Mid-Victorian Narratives
1st Edition
By Borislav Knezevic
January 17, 2019
Figures of Finance Capitalism brings into focus Victorian narratives by major middle-class writers in which the workings of finance capitalism are prominently featured, and reads this interest in finance capitalism in the context of middle-class misgivings about a class system still dominated by a ...
Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry
1st Edition
By John Wrighton
August 23, 2018
From the Objectivists to e-poetry, this thoughtful and innovative book explores the dynamic relationship between the ethical imperative and poetic practice, revitalizing the study of the most prominent post-war American poets in a fresh, provocative way. Contributing to the "turn to ethics" in ...
The Dangerous Potential of Reading: Readers & the Negotiation of Power in Selected Nineteenth-Century Narratives
1st Edition
By Ana-Isabel Aliaga-Buchenau
November 18, 2016
The development of a mass readership, a mass market for books, and a prominent status of reading and readers is reflected in the central role of literacy, reading, and books in the lives of protagonists in nineteenth-century American and French literature. In this book, Ana-Isabel Aliaga-Buchenau ...
Misery's Mathematics: Mourning, Compensation, and Reality in Antebellum American Literature
1st Edition
By Peter Balaam
July 29, 2016
This book reveals the strain of a moment in American cultural history that led several remarkable writers -- including Emerson, Warner, and Melville -- to render the stark rupture of loss in innovative ways. Pushing Protestant culture's sense of loss into secular terrain, these three key ...
Artful Itineraries: European Art and American Careers in High Culture, 1865-1920
1st Edition
By Paul Fisher
July 21, 2016
This study investigates the paradoxical dynamics of American high culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by examining the strategies of Americans who wrote about European art in order to promote and legitimize literary careers. Contrary to the myths they themselves ...
Dissenting Fictions: Identity and Resistance in the Contemporary American Novel
1st Edition
By Cathy Moses
July 21, 2016
This study elucidates the relationship between identity formation and resistance to racial and sexual oppression in a group of contemporary American novels the author terms dissenting fictions, narratives that assert the subjectivity and historicity of marginalized peoples at precisely the moment ...
Transatlantic Engagements with the British Eighteenth Century
1st Edition
By Pamela J. Albert
July 18, 2016
Transatlantic Engagements with the British Eighteenth Century revisits eighteenth-century cultural artifacts through the lens of creative works produced by contemporary writers Beryl Gilroy (Guyana), Derek Walcott (St. Lucia), Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), and David Dabydeen (Guyana). While early studies...