Literary companions, book reviews and guides Books

Book Synopsis""The most effective political statement I could make is in my art work. . . . The most radical kind of politics is language as plain truth."" Leslie Marmon Silko, one of America's best known Native authors, was born in 1948 and grew up at Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico, of mixed Laguna, Mexican, and white ancestry. Her early short stories, poems, and brilliant first novel Ceremony (1977) earned her recognition as a star of the Native American Renaissance. In Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko, her readers will find both the power that fueled her early work and an update on her recent career. A MacArthur ""genius"" grant funded the beginnings of her second novel, Almanac of the Dead. This epic retelling of the 500-year history of the Americas took her ten years to complete. She intended her most recent book, Gardens in the Dunes, a historical novel of the Victorian era, as a reward for her readers who survived the fury of Almanac of the Dead. Silko grants interviews rarely, but the sixteen included here are generously wide-ranging and deeply honest. They reflect her heritage of storytelling and give vivid accounts of her life experiences, her creative processes, and her forthright political views. As she speaks, she spins out descriptions of the living oral traditions, the communal relationships, and the desert landscape that are the sources of her inspiration. Before she decided to become a writer, Silko was a student in the Indian law program at the University of New Mexico. She has dedicated her life and career to the cause of justice for Native Americans. Her interviews, like her art, give voice to the silenced histories of the colonized peoples of the Americas and draw incisive connections between the abuses of the past and contemporary political corruption. The conversations included here reveal how Silko's thought and writing have been influenced by American and British literature, Eastern philosophies, economics, politics, psychology, and physics. As she integrates these into her powerful works and her expansive interviews, she expresses a hopeful vision of global spiritual awakening. Ellen L. Arnold is an assistant professor of English and ethnic studies at East Carolina University. Her work has been published in Studies in American Indian Literatures, Modern Fiction Studies, and National Women's Studies Association Journal.

Read more less

Book SynopsisWith essays by Richard Godden, Catherine Gunther Kodat, Kathryn B. McKee, Peter Nicolaison, Charles A. Peek, Noel Polk, Hortense J. Spillers, Joseph R. Urgo, Linda Wagner-Martin, and Charles Reagan Wilson William Faulkner is Mississippi's most famous author and arguably one of the country's greatest writers. But what was his relationship with America? How did he view the nation, its traditions, its issues? In ten essays from the 1998 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held at the University of Mississippi, Faulkner in America looks closely at the exchange between William Faulkner the writer and his national affiliation. Collectively, the essays ask which American ideas, identities, and conflicts we should associate with Mississippi's Nobel Laureate. The collection explores questions regarding Faulkner's place in American literature, his standing and esteem in literary studies, and his relation to the United States. To address such issues, the writers seek a definition of the phrase ""Faulkner in America."" One difficulty scholars wrestle with is how to deal with Mississippi's place in the union. Surely, Faulkner mused: Is Mississippi in America? When he thought about America, he thought about being left alone, about maintaining his distance. Essays in this volume look at Faulkner's views on the ""greening of American history,"" on American figures such as Thomas Jefferson, on women in American letters, and on the American dream. Authors find that the conceptually invigorating signification of the phrase ""Faulkner in America"" is, finally, provisional. Foremost in Faulkner's mind, in interviews as well as in the aesthetics of the apocryphal Yoknapatawpha County, is that whoever and whatever is in America arrived by battles won and lost, by emigration and enslavement, by choice and by compulsion. Faulkner in America occasions a rigorous examination of Faulkner's American century. Joseph R. Urgo is chair of the English department at the University of Mississippi. His books include Faulkner's Apocrypha, Novel Frames: Literature as Guide to Race, Sex, and History in American Culture, and In the Age of Distraction, all published by University Press of Mississippi. Ann J. Abadie is associate director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. She has co-edited Faulkner in Cultural Context, Faulkner and the Natural World and Faulkner at 100: Retrospect and Prospect, among other Faulkner volumes, all published by University Press of Mississippi.

Read more less

Book Synopsis With essays by Edwin T. Arnold, J. Douglas Canfield, Christine Chollier, George Guillemin, Dianne C. Luce, Jacqueline Scoones, Phillip A. Snyder, Nell Sullivan, and John Wegner The completion of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy--All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998)--marked a major achievement in American literature. Only ten years earlier this now internationally acclaimed novelist had been called the best unknown writer in America. The trilogy is McCarthy's most ambitious project yet, composed at the height of his mature powers over a period of fifteen years. It is ""a miracle in prose,"" as Robert Hass wrote of its middle volume, an unsentimental elegy for the lost world of the cowboy, the passing of the wilderness, and the fading innocence of post--World War II America. The trilogy is a literary accomplishment with wide appeal, for despite the challenging materials in each book, these volumes remained on bestseller lists for many weeks. This collection of essays is the first book to examine these novels as a trilogy, the first to read them as an integrated whole. Together these explorations of McCarthy's magnum opus serve as an ideal companion reader. Represented here are nine of the most notable Cormac McCarthy scholars, both American and European. Their essays provide a substantial exploration of the trilogy from different perspectives. Included are gender issues, eco-critical approaches, explications of the war or land history underlying the trilogy, studies of narrative voice, dreams, the cowboy tradition, and the pastoral tradition, and considerations of McCarthy's moral and spiritual outlook. These essays complement one another in highly provocative ways, prompting new appreciation of the complexity of McCarthy's work and the profundity of his vision. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce are editors of Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy (University Press of Mississippi). This new volume is an admirable companion to Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, bringing McCarthy scholarship into the 21st century.

Read more less

Book SynopsisTo many readers Christopher Isherwood means Berlin. The author of Goodbye to Berlin (1939), the British Isherwood found fame through the adaptation of that work into the stage play and film I Am a Camera and then into the stage musical and film Cabaret. Throughout his career he was a keen observer, always seemingly in the right place at the right time. Whether in Berlin in the 1930s or in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s, Isherwood (1904--86) reflected on his life and his world and wrote perceptive commentary on contemporary European and American history and culture. His ties to California made him more American than British. ""I have spent half my life in the United States,"" he said. ""Los Angeles is a great place for feeling at home because everybody's from someplace else."" Isherwood can be credited for helping make L.A. an acceptable setting for serious fiction, paving the way for John Rechy, Joan Didion, Paul Monette, and Bernard Cooper, among others. The interviews in this volume--two of which have never before been published--stretch over a period of forty years. They address a wide range of topics, including the importance of diary-keeping to his life and work; the interplay between fiction and autobiography; his turning from Christianity to Hinduism; his circle of friends, including W. H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, and E. M. Forster; several important places in his life--Berlin, England, and California; and his homosexual identity. These interviews are substantive, smart, and insightful, allowing the author to discuss his approach to writing of both fiction and nonfiction. ""More and more,"" he explains, ""writing is appearing to me as a kind of self-analysis, a finding-out of something about myself and about the past and about what life is like, as far as I'm concerned: who I am, who these people are, what it's all about."" This emphasis on self-discovery comes as no surprise from a writer who mined his own diaries and experiences for inspiration. As an interviewee, Isherwood is introspective, thoughtful, and humorous. James J. Berg is the program director for the Center for Teaching and Learning, Minnesota State Colleges and Universities. Chris Freeman is an assistant professor of English at St. John's University. Berg and Freeman are editors of The Isherwood Century: Essays on the Life and Work of Christopher Isherwood, which was a finalist for the 2001 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Studies.

Read more less

Book SynopsisMargaret Walker (1915-1998) began her writing career as a poet in the late 1930s. But she was cast into the limelight in 1966 when her novel Jubilee was published to wide critical and commercial acclaim. In interviews ranging from 1972 to 1996, Conversations with Margaret Walker captures Walker's voice as she discusses an incredibly wide range of interests. The same erudition, wit, and love of language on display in Jubilee comes through in conversations, as well as her sense of moral authority--imbued by a resonant Christian humanism--and her attention to historical detail. In a long 1972 conversation with fellow poet Nikki Giovanni, Walker argues about the tribulations and triumphs of motherhood, the presence of black women in literature, and race relations in American culture from 1900 to the present. With Marcia Greenlee in 1977, she talks extensively about her family's history and her love of botany. In several of the interviews, her friendship with Richard Wright rises to the forefront. Even in her interviews with Claudia Tate and John Griffin Jones, in which the interviewers try to direct the conversations toward the mechanics and thought processes behind Walker's writing, the talks often sweep into broader issues of African American culture, family history, and the past's influence on the present. This collection amply shows that Margaret Walker was a writer who considered her work to be deeply influenced by the culture around her. She viewed her writing as part of her larger life and not separate or distanced from her existence. Bracingly direct, witty, and oddly charming, the writer in Conversations with Margaret Walker is complicated, passionate, forceful, and piercingly intelligent.

Read more less

Book SynopsisJoseph Brodsky (1940-1996) is unquestionably the greatest poet to emerge from postwar Russia and one of the great minds of the last century. After his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1972, Brodsky transformed himself from a stunned and unprepared émigré into, as he himself termed it, ""a Russian poet, an English essayist, and, of course, an American citizen."" In interviews from 1972 to 1995, Joseph Brodsky: Conversations covers the course of his exile. The last interview dates from just ten weeks before his death. In talks, he calibrates the process of his remarkable reinvention from a brilliant, brash, but decidedly provincial Leningrad poet to an international man of letters and an erudite Nobel Prize laureate. Brodsky's poetry earned him a Nobel, and his essays won him awards and international acclaim. This volume shows that there was a third medium, in addition to poetry and essays, in which Brodsky excelled--the interview. Although he said that ""in principle prose is simply spilling some beans, which poetry sort of contains in a tight pod,"" he nevertheless emerges as an extraordinary and inventive conversationalist. This volume includes not only his notable interviews that helped consolidate Brodsky's international reputation but also early and hard-to-find interviews in journals that have since disappeared. Cynthia L. Haven is a literary critic at the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Cortland Review, and Stanford Magazine. Her work also has been published in Civilization, the Washington Post, and the Georgia Review.

Read more less

Book SynopsisConversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald assembles over thirty interviews with one of America's greatest novelists, the author of The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night. Although most of these are not standard interviews in the modern sense, the quotes from Fitzgerald and the contemporary journalistic reaction to him reveal much about his writing techniques, artistic wisdom, and life. Editors Matthew J. Bruccoli, the foremost Fitzgerald scholar, and Judith S. Baughman have collected the most usable and articulate pieces on Fitzgerald, including a three-part 1922 interview conducted for the St. Paul Daily News. Fitzgerald (1896-1940) died before the authorial interview became a literary subgenre after World War II. Although Fitzgerald enjoyed his celebrity, as is clear in these pieces, he had a poor sense of public relations and provided interviewers with opportunities to trivialize him. As a result, Fitzgerald was often treated condescendingly in the press. Seven of his interviews-five printed before 1924-have flapper in their headlines. In the Jazz Age-a term Fitzgerald coined-he was regarded as a spokesman for rebellious youth, as a playboy, as an authority on sex and marriage, as an expert on Prohibition, and as an immensely popular writer for his work published in the Saturday Evening Post. Yet his literary ambitions were sizable and his impact on American fiction immeasurable. Matthew J. Bruccoli is Jefferies Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He has written or edited thirty volumes on Fitzgerald, including the standard biography, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Judith S. Baughman, who works in the department of English at the University of South Carolina, has written the F. Scott Fitzgerald volume in the Gale Study Guides series and has edited American Decades: 1920-1929.

Read more less

Book SynopsisAudre Lorde (1934-1992), the author of eleven books of poetry, described herself as a ""Black feminist lesbian poet warrior mother,"" but she added that this phrase was inadequate in capturing her full identity. The interviews in this collection portray the many additional sides of the Harlem-born author and activist. She was also a rebellious child of Caribbean parents, a mastectomy patient, a blue-collar worker, a college professor, a student of African mythology, an experimental autobiographer in her book titled Zami, a critic of imperialism, and a charismatic orator.Despite her intense engagement with the major social movements of her time, Lorde told interviewers that she was always an outsider, a position of weakness and of strength.Most of her schoolmates were white. She married a white legal-aid attorney, and after their divorce she was the partner of a white psychologist for many years. These intimate alliances with whites caused some African Americans of both genders to question the depth of her solidarity. Lorde expressed distrust of some white feminists and charged that they lacked real understanding of African American struggles.Writing proved to be her powerful weapon against injustice. Painfully aware that differences could provoke prejudice and violence, she promoted the bridging of barriers. These interviews reveal the sense of displacement that made Lorde a champion of the outcast and the forgotten--whether in New York, Mississippi, Berlin, or Soweto.

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn the United States, Ishmael Reed, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ralph Ellison, N. Scott Momaday, Toni Morrison, Rudolfo Anaya, Sandra Cisneros, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Jessica Hagedorn are among the notable writers of color who have emerged since World War II. Although definitely individual and widely diverse, they are all-American in their collective mixture of African American, Native American, Asian American, and Hispanic strains. The work of each, although distinct, has not remained in cultural isolation but has enriched the inclusive literary treasury of the United States. This comprehensive, timely study by a British scholar closely examines their fiction and autobiographical writings in cultural perspective. It analyzes the ways politics and popular tradition have influenced their work and the ways these ethnic authors address and question such matters as whiteness, autobiography, geography, and the forms of prose. Other books have explored the variety of ethnic traditions in American literature, but this is the first to consider them in comparative terms in a single volume. In focusing on these writers and their place in the context of American history and contemporary popular culture, Multicultural American Literature underlines the reality that it is multicultural writing that has revolutionized recent American literary history. For those wishing clear and accurate perspective on the national literature of the present day, this informative book analyzes the spectrum and provides an exact and faithful view of its multicultural character. A. Robert Lee, a professor of American literature at Nihon University in Tokyo, is the author of Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America and, with Gerald Vizenor, Postindian Conversations.

Read more less

Book SynopsisTo early European colonists the swamp was a place linked with sin and impurity; to the plantation elite, it was a practical obstacle to agricultural development. For the many excluded from the white southern aristocracy--African Americans, Native Americans, Acadians, and poor, rural whites--the swamp meant something very different, providing shelter and sustenance and offering separation and protection from the dominant plantation culture. Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture explores the interplay of contradictory but equally pre-vailing metaphors: first, the swamp as the underside of the myth of pastoral Eden that defined the antebellum South; and second, the swamp as the last pure vestige of undominated southern eco-culture. As the South gives in to strip malls and suburban sprawl, its wooded wetlands have come to embody the last part of the region that will always be beyond cultural domination. Examining the southern swamp from a perspective informed by ecocriticism, literary studies, and ecological history, Shadow and Shelter considers the many repre-sentations of the swamp and its evolving role in an increasingly multicultural South. Anthony Wilson is assistant professor of English at LaGrange College. His work has been published in the Southern Literary Journal and the Chronicle of Higher Education's online edition.

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhen it was first published, in 1823, Claire de Duras's novel Ourika became a best seller almost immediately, and in recent decades, instructors have found it an irresistible addition to their syllabi. But from a teacher's perspective the novel presents something of a paradox. It is short, its narrative structure is uncomplicated, its vocabulary is limited, its plot is straightforward. It thus lends itself to "simple" readings that fail to reveal the novel's rich fund of social and historical themes. Set against the backdrop of the French and Haitian revolutions, the Terror, and the restoration and featuring the first black woman narrator in French literature,Ourika raises issues of identity, inequality, exclusion, power, and race and gender relations. The goal of this Approaches volume is to help teachers bring out the novel's profound and complex underpinnings and reveal Ourika, its Senegalese protagonist, as a victim of history and a timeless tragic heroine.Part 1 provides an overview of editions of the novel and secondary resources, including critical, historical, and biographical studies. Also featured is a useful time line situating Duras's life in its historical framework. Part 2 offers a wealth of pedagogical approaches, grouped in four sections, which focus on the historical context of the novel; on race, gender, and class issues; on teaching Ourika with other works of literature; and on interdisciplinary perspectives.Throughout the volume, the editions of Ourika referred to are the MLA Texts and Translations paperback editions, in French and in English translation, published in 1994.

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhen it was first published, in 1823, Claire de Duras's novel Ourika became a best seller almost immediately, and in recent decades, instructors have found it an irresistible addition to their syllabi. But from a teacher's perspective the novel presents something of a paradox. It is short, its narrative structure is uncomplicated, its vocabulary is limited, its plot is straightforward. It thus lends itself to "simple" readings that fail to reveal the novel's rich fund of social and historical themes. Set against the backdrop of the French and Haitian revolutions, the Terror, and the restoration and featuring the first black woman narrator in French literature, Ourika raises issues of identity, inequality, exclusion, power, and race and gender relations. The goal of this Approaches volume is to help teachers bring out the novel's profound and complex underpinnings and reveal Ourika, its Senegalese protagonist, as a victim of history and a timeless tragic heroine.Part 1 provides an overview of editions of the novel and secondary resources, including critical, historical, and biographical studies. Also featured is a useful time line situating Duras's life in its historical framework. Part 2 offers a wealth of pedagogical approaches, grouped in four sections, which focus on the historical context of the novel; on race, gender, and class issues; on teaching Ourika with other works of literature; and on interdisciplinary perspectives.Throughout the volume, the editions of Ourika referred to are the MLA Texts and Translations paperback editions, in French and in English translation, published in 1994.

Read more less

Book SynopsisCaterina Albert i Paradís (1869-1966) began her career with a scandal. Her dramatic monologue ""The Infanticide,"" delivered by a young woman, won prizes and garnered the attention of the Catalan literary world, but its harsh theme drew outrage when the anonymous author was revealed to be a woman. In the tradition of George Eliot, George Sand, and other controversial women authors, Albert had assumed a man's name, Víctor Català. She continued to write unflinching narratives, mostly in Catalan, of the people and life around her, producing a body of work still enlisted today to help the Catalan language resist the dominance of Peninsular Spanish.Trade Review“McNerney’s review of concepts relating to modernity and women’s writing in Spain alongside her discussion of Albert’s literary techniques make this […] a useful tool for graduate and undergraduate classrooms. Specialists will enjoy the fact that it debunks myths long perpetuated in Albert’s criticism, as it clarifies that Albert resided in rural as well as urban locales and wrote fiction featuring both back-drops.” – Kate Good, Bulletin of Spanish Studies

Read more less

Book Synopsis“The works of Tim O’Brien are among the most significant recent contributions to a lengthy canon of war literature,” write the editors of this volume; they serve “as an ideal point of entry for discussions of war and its human impact.” The author of the highly acclaimed The Things They Carried, O’Brien is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and the winner of a National Book Award for Going After Cacciato.This volume in the Approaches to Teaching series considers the range and depth of O’Brien’s writing, with an emphasis on works that focus on the Vietnam War. Part 1, “Materials,” provides information on O’Brien’s life and an overview of his literary output. It also directs readers to critical and reference works on subjects encountered in his writing. The twenty-three essays in part 2, “Approaches,” provide historical background on the Vietnam War; explore narrative issues in O’Brien’s works, such as the melding of fiction, nonfiction, and memoir; and suggest ideas for teaching the author’s works in a variety of classroom and conceptual settings (e.g., composition, American literature, war fiction, narrative theory, postmodernism).

Read more less

Book Synopsis“The works of Tim O’Brien are among the most significant recent contributions to a lengthy canon of war literature,” write the editors of this volume; they serve “as an ideal point of entry for discussions of war and its human impact.” The author of the highly acclaimed The Things They Carried, O’Brien is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and the winner of a National Book Award for Going After Cacciato.This volume in the Approaches to Teaching series considers the range and depth of O’Brien’s writing, with an emphasis on works that focus on the Vietnam War. Part 1, “Materials,” provides information on O’Brien’s life and an overview of his literary output. It also directs readers to critical and reference works on subjects encountered in his writing. The twenty-three essays in part 2, “Approaches,” provide historical background on the Vietnam War; explore narrative issues in O’Brien’s works, such as the melding of fiction, nonfiction, and memoir; and suggest ideas for teaching the author’s works in a variety of classroom and conceptual settings (e.g., composition, American literature, war fiction, narrative theory, postmodernism).

Read more less

Book Synopsis“An admirable ruse, indeed! To inspire in me the horror of females, only to throw it in my face and say: but this is what you are.”The handsome, heroic heir to a vast estate, raised as a man to follow a man’s pursuits and to despise women, is devastated to learn at the age of seventeen that he is in fact a she. Gabriel courageously refuses to give up her male privileges, and her tragic struggle to work and fight and love in all the ways she knows how offers a window into the obstacles faced by George Sand, the prolific intellectual woman whom the popular press portrayed as a promiscuous, cigar-smoking oddity in trousers. “Strange that the most virile talent of our time should be a woman’s!” exclaimed a reviewer in 1838.Kathleen Robin Hart’s introduction contextualizes the drama, discussing its relation to the theater of Sand’s day, the sentimental tradition, the subversive workings of carnival and masquerade, and the vein of literary androgyny in Romantic works.

Read more less

Book SynopsisConsiders the issues critical to teaching recently rediscovered writers, such as Hélisenne de Crenne, Pernette Du Guillet, and Louise Labé, who have enriched the literary canon by offering alternative perspectives on the social, political, and religious issues of early modern France. Addressing topics from law and medicine to motherhood and aesthetics, these women wrote in nearly every genre, and their works include several literary firsts: the first book of Christian emblems ever published by a woman (Georgette de Montenay), the first published collection of private letters between women in French (the Dames Des Roches), and the first full-length memoir by a woman in French (Margaret of Valois).The volume considers techniques for reading women’s writing alongside the texts of their male contemporaries and offers guidance on incorporating a range of resources into the classroom. Essays in part 1 explore the background and contexts so crucial for helping students understand how these writers negotiated their entry into the public world of writing. In part 2, contributors discuss specific genres. Part 3 describes critical methodologies that are useful in the classroom and demonstrates the benefits of teaching certain pairings of texts and authors. The fourth and final part recommends a range of electronic and print resources.

Read more less

Book SynopsisNella Larsen’s novels Quicksand and Passing, published at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, fell out of print and ere thus little known for many years. Now widely available and taught, Quicksand and Passing challenge conventional “tragic mulatta” and “passing” narratives. In part 1, “Materials,” of Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Nella Larsen, the editor surveys the canon of Larsen’s writing, evaluates editions of her works, recommends secondary readings, and compiles a list of useful multimedia resources for teaching.The essays in part 2, “Approaches,” aim to help students better understand attitudes towards women and race during the Harlem Renaissance, the novels’ relations to other artistic movements, and legal debates over racial identities in the early twentieth century. In so doing, contributors demonstrate how new and seasoned instructors alike might use Larsen’s novels to explore a wide range of topics-including Larsen’s short stories and letters. The relation between her writing and biography, and the novels; discussion of gender and sexuality.

Read more less

Book SynopsisA central figure of Spanish culture and an author in many genres, Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) is less well known outside Spain. He was a surprising writer and thinker: a professor of Greek who embraced metafiction and modernist methods; a proponent of Castilian Spanish although born in the Basque country and influenced by many international writers; religious yet an early existentialist. He found himself in opposition to both King Alfonso XIII and the military dictatorship of José Primo de Rivera, then became involved in the political upheaval that led to the Spanish Civil War.Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," gives information on different editions and translations of Unamuno's works, on scholarly and critical secondary sources, and on Web resources. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," offer suggestions for introducing students to the range of his works--novels, essays, poetry, and philosophy--in Spanish language and literature and comparative literature classrooms.Trade ReviewThis is a very valuable tool for instructors at all levels of the Spanish curriculum . . . and is sure to be of use to scholars and teachers in other fields--comparative literature, philosophy, religion--who may be interested in including Unamuno in their classes." - Roberta Lee Johnson, University of Kansas

Read more less

Book SynopsisGlobal and cosmopolitan since the late nineteenth century, anglophone South Asian women's writing has flourished in many genres and locations, encompassing diverse works linked by issues of language, geography, history, culture, gender, and literary tradition. Whether writing in the homeland or in the diaspora, authors offer representations of social struggle and inequality while articulating possibilities for resistance.In this volume experienced instructors attend to the style and aesthetics of the texts as well as provide necessary background for students. Essays address historical and political contexts, including colonialism, partition, migration, ecological concerns, and evolving gender roles, and consider both traditional and contemporary genres such as graphic novels, chick lit, and Instapoetry. Presenting ideas for courses in Asian studies, women's studies, postcolonial literature, and world literature, this book asks broadly what it means to study anglophone South Asian women's writing in the United States, Asia, and around the world.Trade ReviewThis is an expansive volume that will be useful to teachers of South Asian studies, gender studies, and postcolonial literature. Covering both widely known and noncanonical texts, the essays offer an exciting array of methods for teaching anglophone South Asian women's writing from a range of theoretical perspectives and cultural contexts." - Ulka Anjaria, Brandeis University

Read more less

Book SynopsisGlobal and cosmopolitan since the late nineteenth century, anglophone South Asian women's writing has flourished in many genres and locations, encompassing diverse works linked by issues of language, geography, history, culture, gender, and literary tradition. Whether writing in the homeland or in the diaspora, authors offer representations of social struggle and inequality while articulating possibilities for resistance.In this volume experienced instructors attend to the style and aesthetics of the texts as well as provide necessary background for students. Essays address historical and political contexts, including colonialism, partition, migration, ecological concerns, and evolving gender roles, and consider both traditional and contemporary genres such as graphic novels, chick lit, and Instapoetry. Presenting ideas for courses in Asian studies, women's studies, postcolonial literature, and world literature, this book asks broadly what it means to study anglophone South Asian women's writing in the United States, Asia, and around the world.Trade ReviewThis is an expansive volume that will be useful to teachers of South Asian studies, gender studies, and postcolonial literature. Covering both widely known and noncanonical texts, the essays offer an exciting array of methods for teaching anglophone South Asian women's writing from a range of theoretical perspectives and cultural contexts." - Ulka Anjaria, Brandeis University

Read more less

Book SynopsisA collection of short stories by Renée Vivien (1877-1909). Reflects and challenges attitudes of the belle epoque, questions gender roles, and represents same-sex love and desire. Stories feature unreliable narrators and include rewritten fairy tales and ancient myths, adventure stories in the American West and at sea, and others.Trade ReviewMore than a century after their publication, Renée Vivien's short stories foreground issues that women continue to face: sexual violence, double standards, and social inequality." - Gayle Levy, University of Missouri, Kansas City "The editor's references to the Me Too movement . . . show how Vivien's stories anticipate issues women are grappling with today." - Tama Lea Engelking, Cleveland State University

Read more less

Book SynopsisStructurally innovative and culturally expansive, the works of Karen Tei Yamashita invite readers to rethink conventional paradigms of genres and national traditions. Her novels, plays, and other texts refashion forms like the immigrant tale, the postmodern novel, magical realism, apocalyptic literature, and the picaresque and suggest new transnational, hemispheric, and global frameworks for interpreting Asian American literature.Addressing courses in American studies, contemporary fiction, environmental humanities, and literary theory, the essays in this volume are written by undergraduate and graduate instructors from across the United States and around the globe. Part 1, “Materials,” outlines Yamashita’s novels and other texts, key works of criticism and theory, and resources for Asian American and Asian Brazilian literature and culture. Part 2, “Approaches,” provides options for exploring Yamashita’s works through teaching historical debates, outlining principles of environmental justice, mapping geographic boundaries to highlight power dynamics, and drawing personal connections to the texts. Additionally, an essay by Yamashita describes her own approaches to teaching creative writing.Trade Review“This book will be a vital resource for teachers, students, and scholars. . . . After reading it, I am doubly inspired to teach Yamashita’s works.”- Sue-Im Lee, Temple University;“The collection successfully conveys how Yamashita’s writing represents a ‘dynamic force’ for readers. . . . I would certainly recommend it.”- Bella Adams, Liverpool John Moores University.

Read more less

Book SynopsisStructurally innovative and culturally expansive, the works of Karen Tei Yamashita invite readers to rethink conventional paradigms of genres and national traditions. Her novels, plays, and other texts refashion forms like the immigrant tale, the postmodern novel, magical realism, apocalyptic literature, and the picaresque and suggest new transnational, hemispheric, and global frameworks for interpreting Asian American literature.Addressing courses in American studies, contemporary fiction, environmental humanities, and literary theory, the essays in this volume are written by undergraduate and graduate instructors from across the United States and around the globe. Part 1, “Materials,” outlines Yamashita’s novels and other texts, key works of criticism and theory, and resources for Asian American and Asian Brazilian literature and culture. Part 2, “Approaches,” provides options for exploring Yamashita’s works through teaching historical debates, outlining principles of environmental justice, mapping geographic boundaries to highlight power dynamics, and drawing personal connections to the texts. Additionally, an essay by Yamashita describes her own approaches to teaching creative writing.Trade Review“This book will be a vital resource for teachers, students, and scholars. . . . After reading it, I am doubly inspired to teach Yamashita’s works.”- Sue-Im Lee, Temple University;“The collection successfully conveys how Yamashita’s writing represents a ‘dynamic force’ for readers. . . . I would certainly recommend it.”- Bella Adams, Liverpool John Moores University.

Read more less

Book SynopsisFrom the short stories and journalism of Sui Sin Far to Maxine Hong Kingston's pathbreaking The Woman Warrior to recent popular and critical successes such as Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer, Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Kevin Kwan's Crazy Rich Asians, Asian North American literature and media encompass a long history and a diverse variety of genres and aesthetic approaches.The essays in this volume provide context for understanding the history of Asian immigrants to the United States and Canada and the experiences of their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Contributors both address historical contexts, from the early enactment of Asian exclusion laws to the xenophobia following 9/11, and provide tools for textual analysis. The essays explore conventionally literary texts, genres such as mystery and speculative fiction, historical documents and legal texts, and visual media including films, photography, and graphic novels, emphasizing the ways that creators have crossed boundaries of genre and created innovative new forms.Trade ReviewShowcases the increasing diversity and visibility of this important literary tradition." —Tina Chen, Penn State University

Read more less

Book SynopsisTeaching strategies for one of the world's most widely read collections of stories The Thousand and One Nights, composed in Arabic from the eighth to the fourteenth centuries, is one of the world's most widely circulated and influential collections of stories. To help instructors introduce the tales to students, this volume provides historical context and discusses the many transformations of the stories in a variety of cultures. Among the topics covered are the numerous translations and their impact on the tales' reception; various genres represented by the tales; gender, race, and slavery; and adaptations of the stories in films, graphic novels, and other media across the world and under conditions of both imperialism and postcolonialism. The essays serve instructors in subjects like medieval literature, world literature, and Middle and Near Eastern studies and make a case for teaching the Thousand and One Nights in courses on identity and race.

Read more less

Book SynopsisTeaching strategies for one of the world's most widely read collections of stories The Thousand and One Nights, composed in Arabic from the eighth to the fourteenth centuries, is one of the world's most widely circulated and influential collections of stories. To help instructors introduce the tales to students, this volume provides historical context and discusses the many transformations of the stories in a variety of cultures. Among the topics covered are the numerous translations and their impact on the tales' reception; various genres represented by the tales; gender, race, and slavery; and adaptations of the stories in films, graphic novels, and other media across the world and under conditions of both imperialism and postcolonialism. The essays serve instructors in subjects like medieval literature, world literature, and Middle and Near Eastern studies and make a case for teaching the Thousand and One Nights in courses on identity and race.

Read more less

Book SynopsisAlthough he did not start publishing until middle age, Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) had over sixty published books to his credit by the time of his death. One of them, the short novel A Clockwork Orange (1962), was to bring him fame and notoriety outside England following the 1971 release of Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation. The prominence of that single novel would impel its author to confront a public continually asking directly or by implication: What else have you written, Mr. Burgess? Burgess produced scores of novels, biographies, books of literary criticism, film scripts, and news articles. A linguist and polyglot who was fluent in eight languages, he invented the language used in the 1981 film Quest for Fire. He translated and adapted Bizet's Carmen, Weber's Oberon, and other operas for the English stage. His ReJoyce: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader remains a standard in Joycean criticism. Conversations with Anthony Burgess captures, through in-depth interviews, a writer of tremendous energy, inventiveness, and self-discipline. The collection brings together interviews from 1971 to 1989, including two pieces published for the first time. Earl G. Ingersoll is distinguished professor emeritus of English at SUNY College at Brockport. He has written, edited, and coedited many books, including Conversations with May Sarton and Conversations with Rita Dove, both from University Press of Mississippi. Mary C. Ingersoll is a retired elementary school teacher who specialized in teaching humanities to gifted students.

Read more less

Book SynopsisConversations with Caryl Phillips collects nineteen interviews conducted over more than two decades on both sides of the Atlantic and in the Caribbean. While Phillips (b. 1958) admittedly tends to hide behind his characters in his fiction, he is completely forthcoming in his interviews, where he describes in detail the personal experiences of migration and dislocation that inspired his writing.He shares ideas about his aesthetics, in particular his noted use of a fractured, polyphonic form. These exchanges demonstrate Phillips's knowledge about the contemporary world of politics and of writing while revealing his engaging humor, his sharp intelligence, and his deep commitment to the overarching aims of his work.

Read more less

Book SynopsisOctavia Butler (1947-2006) spent the majority of her prolific career as the only major black female author of science fiction. Winner of both the Nebula and Hugo Awards as well as a MacArthur ""genius"" grant, the first for a science fiction writer, Butler created worlds that challenged notions of race, sex, gender, and humanity. Whether in the postapocalyptic future of the Parable stories, in the human inability to assimilate change and difference in the Xenogenesis books, or in the destructive sense of superiority in the Patternist series, Butler held up a mirror, reflecting what is beautiful, corrupt, worthwhile, and damning about the world we inhabit. In interviews ranging from 1980 until just before her sudden death in 2006, Conversations with Octavia Butler reveals a writer very much aware of herself as the ""rare bird"" of science fiction even as she shows frustration with the constant question,""How does it feel to be the only one?"" Whether discussing humanity's biological imperatives or the difference between science fiction and fantasy or the plight of the working poor in America, Butler emerges in these interviews as funny, intelligent, complicated, and intensely original.

Read more less

Book SynopsisConversations with Ian McEwan collects sixteen interviews, conducted over three decades, with the British author of such highly praised novels as Enduring Love, Atonement, Saturday, and On Chesil Beach. McEwan (b. 1948) discusses his views on authorship, the writing process, and major themes found in his fiction, but he also expands upon his interests in music, film, global politics, the sciences, and the state of literature in contemporary society.McEwan's candid and forthcoming discussions with notable contemporary writers---Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Ian Hamilton, David Remnick, and Stephen Pinker---provide readers with the most in-depth portrait available of the author and his works.Readers will find McEwan to be just as engaging, humorous, and intelligent as his writings suggest. The volume includes interviews from British, Spanish, French, and American sources, two interviews previously available only in audio format, and a new interview conducted with the book's editor.

Read more less

Book SynopsisConversations with Ian McEwan collects sixteen interviews, conducted over three decades, with the British author of such highly praised novels as Enduring Love, Atonement, Saturday, and On Chesil Beach. McEwan (b. 1948) discusses his views on authorship, the writing process, and major themes found in his fiction, but he also expands upon his interests in music, film, global politics, the sciences, and the state of literature in contemporary society.McEwan's candid and forthcoming discussions with notable contemporary writers---Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Ian Hamilton, David Remnick, and Stephen Pinker---provide readers with the most in-depth portrait available of the author and his works.Readers will find McEwan to be just as engaging, humorous, and intelligent as his writings suggest. The volume includes interviews from British, Spanish, French, and American sources, two interviews previously available only in audio format, and a new interview conducted with the book's editor.

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn The Story-Time of the British Empire, author Sadhana Naithani examines folklore collections compiled by British colonial administrators, military men, missionaries, and women in the British colonies of Africa, Asia, and Australia between 1860 and 1950. Much of this work was accomplished in the context of colonial relations and done by non-folklorists, yet these oral narratives and poetic expressions of non-Europeans were transcribed, translated, published, and discussed internationally. Naithani analyzes the role of folklore scholarship in the construction of colonial cultural politics as well as in the conception of international folklore studies.Since most folklore scholarship and cultural history focuses exclusively on specific nations, there is little study of cross-cultural phenomena about empire and/or postcoloniality. Naithani argues that connecting cultural histories, especially in relation to previously colonized countries, is essential to understanding those countries' folklore, as these folk traditions result from both internal and European influence. The author also makes clear the role folklore and its study played in shaping intercultural perceptions that continue to exist in the academic and popular realms today. The Story-Time of the British Empire is a bold argument for a twenty-first-century vision of folklore studies that is international in scope and that understands folklore as a transnational entity.

Read more less

Book SynopsisAbsalom, Absalom! has long been regarded as one of William Faulkner's most difficult, dense, and multilayered novels. It is, on one level, the story of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, ""who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him."" On another level, the book narrates the tragedy that befalls the entire Sutpen family and that tragedy's legacy that continues well into the twentieth century and beyond. The novel's intricate, demanding prose style, and its haunting dramatization of the South's intricate, demanding history make it a masterpiece of twentieth-century American literature.Reading Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom! offers a close examination and interpretation of the novel. Here difficult words and cultural terms that might prove to be a problem for general readers are explained and keyed to page numbers in the definitive Faulkner text (Library of America and Vintage editions). The authors place Faulkner's novel in its historical context, while also connecting it to his other works.

Read more less

Book SynopsisConversations with Jonathan Lethem collects fourteen interviews, conducted over a decade and a half, with the Brooklyn-born author of such novels as Girl in Landscape, Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, Chronic City, and many others. Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award, Lethem (b. 1964) covers a wide range of subjects, from what it means to incorporate genre into literature, to the impact of the death of his mother on his life and work, to his being a permanent ""sophomore on leave"" from Bennington College, as well as his flight from Brooklyn to California and its lasting effect on his fiction. Lethem also reveals the many literary and pop culture influences that have informed his writing life.Readers will find Lethem as charming and generous and intelligent as his work. His examination of what it means to live a creative life will reverberate and enlighten scholars and fans alike. His thoughts on science fiction, intellectual property, literary realism, genre, movies, and rock 'n' roll are articulated with elán throughout the collection, as are his comments on his own development as a craftsman.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe first book-length study of a gifted American writer and her life during the 1920sThe Benét name immediately evokes Stephen Vincent and his older brother William Rose, Pulitzer Prize–winning poets and novelists during the first half of the twentieth century. Less well remembered are the remarkable women related to the Benét brothers, including Rosemary Carr, Stephen's wife; Laura, his sister; Elinor Wylie, William's second wife; and Kathleen Norris, the popular novelist who raised the children of her brother-in-law William.Darling Ro and the Benét Women presents a revealing glimpse of social and literary life in New York and Paris during the 1920s. Using a recently released collection of letters from the Benét Collection at Yale University, author Evelyn Helmick Hively extracts captivating anecdotes and impressions about a talented group of writers and impressive feminist figures. Written by Rosemary Carr Benét to her mother, Dr. Rachel Hickey Carr (one of Chicago's first women physicians), the compilation of letters and short dispatches from Paris provides the focus of the book.A gifted poet and journalist, Rosemary Carr was a prolific writer of articles for the New York Herald-Tribune, Harper's Bazaar, and Vogue; of stories and poems for The New Yorker and other magazines; and hundreds of letters. She belonged to a remarkably skillful, social, and artistic group of men and women who bonded early in life, and her letters paint fascinating portraits of their lives, careers, and relationships.Darling Ro and the Benét Women offers an insider's perspective of a well-known cosmopolitan American family.

Read more less

Book SynopsisA collection of essays tracing seven decades of literary interaction between Hemingway and notable French authorsIn a 1946 Atlantic Monthly essay, Jean-Paul Sartre writes: "The greatest literary development in France between 1929 and 1939 was the discovery of Faulkner, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Caldwell, and Steinbeck."When Ernest Hemingway arrived in Paris in 1922, he was an unknown writer from America. The City of Light was where he learned his craft and gained legitimacy. Although much has been written about Hemingway's apprentice years in Paris, little has been published about his literary convergences with French writers. In Hemingway and French Writers, Ben Stoltzfus illuminates the connections between Hemingway and the most important French intellectuals, such as Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, André Gide, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henry de Montherlant, André Malraux, and Albert Camus. A distinguished scholar of both French literature and Hemingway studies, Stoltzfus compares Hemingway's major works in chronological order, from The Sun Also Rises to The Old Man and the Sea, with novels by French writers.While it is widely known that France influenced Hemingway's writing, Hemingway also had an immense impact on French writers. Over the years, American and French novelists enriched each other's works with new styles and untried techniques. In this comparative analysis, Stoltzfus discusses the complexities of Hemingway's craft, the controlled skill, narrative economy, and stylistic clarity that the French, drawn to his emphasis on action, labeled "le style américain."

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe first extensive treatment of Sherwood Anderson's work from a postmodern perspectiveSherwood Anderson, remembered chiefly as a writer of short stories about life in the Midwest at the turn of the century, was acknowledged as an innovator of the short story form and a major influence on such writers as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Valuable critical studies have examined his works from biographical, New Critical, or psychoanalytical approaches, but contemporary criticism on Anderson has been nearly nonexistent.A New Book of the Grotesques (the title is adapted from the first tale in Winesburg, Ohio) does not challenge previous studies of Anderson as much as it looks at Anderson's early fiction from contemporary interpretative methodologies, particularly from poststructuralist approaches. With this study, author Robert Dunne breaks new ground in Sherwood Anderson scholarship: his is the first sustained, full-length critical work on Anderson from a postmodern theoretical perspective and is the first study of a substantial body of Anderson's work to be published in more than thirty years.A New Book of the Grotesques is an important critical study that adds significantly to the field and to the understanding of Sherwood Anderson's fiction and the modernist period.

Read more less

Book SynopsisAn inside look at the Inklings and their creative process C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and the other Inklings met each week to read and discuss each other's works-in-progress, offering both encouragement and blistering critique. How did these conversations shape the books they were writing? How does creative collaboration enhance individual talent? And what can we learn from their example?Complemented with original illustrations by James Owen, Bandersnatch offers an inside look at the Inklings of Oxford—and a seat at their table at the Eagle and Child pub. It shows how encouragement and criticism made all the difference in The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, and dozens of other books written by the members of this literary group. You'll learn what made these writers tick and more: inspired by their example, you'll discover how collaboration can help your own creative process and lead to genius breakthroughs in whatever work you do."No one knows more than Diana Pavlac Glyer about the internal workings of the Inklings. In Bandersnatch, she shows us how they inspired, encouraged, refined, and opposed one another in the course of producing some of the greatest literature of the last one hundred years. A brilliant and beautifully clear case study of iron sharpening iron." —Michael Ward, coeditor of C. S. Lewis at Poets' Corner"The Inklings are about as important a group as ever existed in the literary world. This tremendous new book about them is much anticipated and hugely welcome!" —Eric Metaxas, New York Times best-selling author of Bonhoeffer and Miracles"What a gift! Bandersnatch is a joy to read and helps dispel that dangerous myth that our greatest writers created in solitude. We all need community in order to do our best work, and this book will show you how some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century did just that. You won't be able to read this book just once." —Jeff Goins, founder of Tribe Writers and author of The Art of WorkTrade Review“No one knows more than Diana Pavlac Glyer about the internal workings of the Inklings. In Bandersnatch, she shows us how they inspired, encouraged, refined, and opposed one another in the course of producing some of the greatest literature of the last one hundred years. A brilliant and beautifully clear case study of iron sharpening iron.”— Michael Ward, coeditor of C. S. Lewis at Poets’ Corner“The Inklings are about as important a group as ever existed in the literary world. This tremendous new book about them is much anticipated and hugely welcome!”— Eric Metaxas, New York Times best-selling author of Bonhoeffer and Miracles“What a gift! Bandersnatch is a joy to read and helps dispel that dangerous myth that our greatest writers created in solitude. We all need community in order to do our best work, and this book will show you how some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century did just that. You won’t be able to read this book just once.”— Jeff Goins, founder of Tribe Writers and author of The Art of Work"Besides being of interest to fans of Tolkien, Lewis, and the other Inklings, "Bandersnatch" also is also helpful to aspiring writers, artists, and inventors, providing suggestions on how to interact with others in the same kind of creative collaboration the Inklings did.'— Examiner.com

Read more less

Book SynopsisUsing a philosophical lens to more deeply examine, appreciate, and understand C. S. Lewis's writingsDrawing on C. S. Lewis's essays, sermons, and fiction, The Lion's Country offers a comprehensive exploration of Lewis's understanding of reality—important, Charlie W. Starr argues, to more fully understand Lewis's writing but also to challenge and inform our own thought about what constitutes the Real.For Lewis, reality is not simply a matter of what we can ascertain with our senses; the Real includes but also transcends the physical. Indeed, for Lewis, who is perhaps the most influential Christian writer of the 20th century, God is the most Real thing there is. Yet during the modernist era when Lewis lived, taught, and wrote, the prevailing view was that the only legitimate knowledge was that which could be derived from empirically provable facts. Lewis's rejection of such a narrow belief prompted him to ask, "What are facts without interpretation?" and led to his lifelong pursuit of experiencing and understanding the Real. Much of his fiction, including The Chronicles of Narnia, is fundamentally about how we can encounter reality and be certain of what we know.Starr's unique look at Lewis's philosophical and theological underpinnings extends even to a discussion of heaven and what it would be like to see the face of God. Including a never-before-released passage from Lewis's unpublished Prayer Manuscript, The Lion's Country is an essential contribution to Lewis studies.Trade Review"In The Lion's Country, Charlie Starr skillfully guides us through Lewis's theory of reality, a world of fine distinctions and conceptual and linguistic pitfalls. After finishing, readers will be well equipped to journey further on their own. Clear, engaging, and insightful." —Devin Brown, professor of English at Asbury University and author of A Life Observed: A Spiritual Biography of C. S. Lewis "Starr has provided us with a new thread to weave together the many different works in many different genres that flowed from Lewis's pen over a quarter century." —Louis Markos, professor of English and scholar in residence at Houston Baptist University and author of The Life and Writings of C. S. Lewis, C. S. Lewis for Beginners, The Myth Made Fact "Starr, a professor of English at Alderson Broaddus University who is also an expert on Lewis's handwriting, has a deep and intimate knowledge of Lewis's full body of work. In his new book, he marshals that knowledge for a single purpose: to tease out what Lewis had to say in his fiction, nonfiction, essays, letters, and sermons about the nature of reality. .... Such wonders await the reader who, guided by Starr, ventures into the realms of C. S. Lewis."—Christianity Today

Read more less

Book SynopsisWithin the past ten years, the field of contemporary American literary studies has changed significantly. Following the turn of the twenty-first century and mounting doubts about the continued explanatory power of the category of “postmodernism,” new organizations have emerged, book series have been launched, journals have been created, and new methodologies, periodizations, and thematics have redefined the field. Postmodern/Postwar—and After aims to be a field-defining book—a sourcebook for the new and emerging critical terrain—that explores the postmodern/postwar period and what comes after.The first section of essays returns to the category of the “postmodern” and argues for the usefulness of key concepts and themes from postmodernism to the study of contemporary literature, or reevaluates postmodernism in light of recent developments in the field and historical and economic changes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These essays take the contemporary abandonments of postmodernism as an occasion to assess the current states of postmodernity. After that, the essays move to address the critical shift away from postmodernism as a description of the present, and toward a new sense of postmodernism as just one category among many that scholars can use to describe the recentpast. The final section looks forward and explores the question of what comes after the postwar/postmodern.Taken together, these essays from leading and emerging scholars on the state of twenty-first-century literary studies provide a number of frameworks for approaching contemporary literature as influenced by, yet distinct from, postmodernism. The result is an indispensable guide that seeks to represent and understand the major overhauling of postwar American literary studies that is currently underway.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe American nineteenth century witnessed a media explosion unprecedented in human history. New communications technologies seemed to be everywhere, offering opportunities and threats that seem powerfully familiar to us as we experience today’s digital revolution. Walt Whitman’s poetry reveled in the potentials of his time: “See, the many-cylinder’d steam printing-press,” he wrote, “See, the electric telegraph, stretching across the Continent, from the Western Sea to Manhattan.”Still, as the budding poet learned, books neither sell themselves nor move themselves: without an efficient set of connections to get books to readers, the democratic media-saturated future Whitman imagined would have remained warehoused. Whitman’s works sometimes ran through the “many-cylinder’d steam printing press” and were carried in bulk on “the strong and quick locomotive.” Yet during his career, his publications did not follow a progressive path toward mass production and distribution. Even at the end of his life, in the 1890s as his fame was growing, the poet was selling copies of his latest works by hand to visitors at his small house in Camden, New Jersey. Mass media and centralization were only one part of the rich media world that Whitman embraced.Whitman’s Drift asks how the many options for distributing books and newspapers shaped the way writers wrote and readers read. Writers like Whitman spoke to the imagination inspired by media transformations by calling attention to connectedness, to how literature not only moves us emotionally, but moves around in the world among people and places. Studying that literature and how it circulated can help us understand not just how to read Whitman’s works and times, but how to understand what is happening to our imaginations now, in the midst of the twenty-first century media explosion.Trade Review"Matt Cohen’s innovative new book, demonstrates convincingly that in spite of the technological advances contributing to this puzzle, matters were no less complex in the latter half of the nineteenth century. [...] Ultimately, as his title suggests, attempting to understand the process and significance of literary circulation, whether in the nineteenth century or in a world where readers can find the poet’s work with the click of a mouse, requires not only thorough research but also considerable imagination. This noteworthy new study features a great deal of both." — ALH Online Review, XXVI.1 (2018)

Read more less

Book SynopsisHope Isn’t Stupid is the first study to interrogate the neglected connections between affect and the practice of utopia in contemporary American literature. Although these concepts are rarely theorized together, it is difficult to fully articulate utopia without understanding how affects circulate within utopian texts. Moving away from science fiction—the genre in which utopian visions are often located—author Sean Grattan resuscitates the importance of utopianism in recent American literary history. Doing so enables him to assert the pivotal role contemporary American literature has to play in allowing us to envision alternatives to global neoliberal capitalism.Novelists William S. Burroughs, Dennis Cooper, John Darnielle, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, and Colson Whitehead are deeply invested in the creation of utopian possibilities. A return to reading the utopian wager in literature from the postmodern to the contemporary period reinvigorates critical forms that imagine reading as an act of communication, friendship, solace, and succor. These forms also model richer modes of belonging than the diluted and impoverished ones on display in the neoliberal present. Simultaneously, by linking utopian studies and affect studies, Grattan’s work resists the tendency for affect studies to codify around the negative, instead reorienting the field around the messy, rich, vibrant, and ambivalent affective possibilities of the world. Hope Isn’t Stupid insists on the centrality of utopia not only in American literature, but in American life as well.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe Whitman Revolution brings together a rich collection of Betsy Erkkila's phenomenally influential essays that have been published over the years, along with two powerful new essays. Erkkila offers a moving account of the inseparable mix of the spiritual-sexual-political in Whitman and the absolute centrality of male-male connection to his work and thinking. Her work has been at the forefront of scholarship positing that Whitman's songs are songs not only of workers and occupations but of sex and the body, homoeroticism, and liberation. What is more, Erkkila's writing demonstrates that this sexuality and communal impulse is central to Whitman's revolutionary poetry and his conception of democracy itself - an insight that was all but suppressed during the mid-twentieth century emergence of American literature as a field of study.Highlights of this collection include Erkkila's essays on pairings such as Marx and Whitman, Dickinson and Whitman, and Melville and Whitman. Across the volume, she demonstrates an international vision that highlights the place of Leaves of Grass within a global struggle for democracy. The Whitman Revolution is evidence of Erkkila's remarkable ability to lead critical discussions, and marks an exciting event in Whitman studies.Trade Review"In this outstanding collection of essays, Betsy Erkkila situates Whitman within the global struggle for democracy, and confirms her place as the preeminent scholar of Whitman's politics."— Kenneth M. Price, author Whitman in Washington: Becoming the National Poet in the Federal City"For those working in Whitman studies, Erkkila needs no introduction. [...] Erkkila’s seminal analysis changed how we may interpret not only “Calamus” but also its counterpart, the “Children of Adam” sequence, and makes for striking reading in 2021. [...] Even so, this rich, multifaceted theorizing of “the Whitman revolution” and why poetry matters will be immensely valuable both to Whitman scholars and to readers more generally. It issues a call to action, asking us as readers to fulfill the most radical and inclusive aspects of Whitman’s democratic imaginings." — ALH Online

Read more less

Book SynopsisEcospatiality explores modern and contemporary American prose literature through the lens of place, showing how authors like William Least Heat-Moon, Willa Cather, Richard Wright, and Leslie Marmon Silko represent and reimagine real places in the world and the human-environment relationships therein. Building on the work of scholars in geography, sociology, ecocriticism, and geocriticism, this book articulates the theory of ecospatiality: an understanding of place as simultaneously spatial, ecological, and historical. In our current historical moment, which is characterized by ongoing ecological collapse and a not-unrelated increase in social disorder, few issues are more urgent than the human relationship with our environments. Whether we characterize this new epoch as the climate change era or the Anthropocene, we can no longer ignore the fact that the places we live are rapidly changing in response to economic and environmental pressures. Rather than thinking of place as a neutral site for social interaction, we should recognize how it underpins and intertwines with human experience.Fortunately, literature can help us think through how place operates. Lowell Wyse shows that texts can be understood as works of literary cartography. Focusing on works of nonfiction and fiction whose primary settings are on the North American continent, Ecospatiality demonstrates how these narratives rely on realistic literary geography to invoke, and sometimes retell, important aspects of environmental history within particular communities and bioregions.Trade ReviewIn the past, I have found it hard to recommend any single work that seemed like a comprehensive introduction to the field of place-conscious literary studies. This book is it." - Tom Lynch, University of Nebraska "Ecospatiality is a tour de force of literary cartography. Ranging across histories, bioregions, and communities-Indigenous, Latinx, African American, European American-Wyse introduces the concept of ecospatiality into the lexicon of the deep map. In a study that is impressively comprehensive, he contributes innovative readings of American authors and American landscapes." - Susan Naramore Maher, coeditor, Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time

Read more less

Book SynopsisEver since his first novel, Fight Club, was made into a cult film by David Fincher, Chuck Palahniuk has been a consistent presence on the New York Times best-seller list. A target of critics but a fan favorite, Palahniuk has been loathed and loved in equal measure for his dark humor, edgy topics, and confrontational writing style. In close readings of Fight Club and the thirteen novels that this controversial author has published since, Douglas Keesey argues that Palahniuk is much more than a “shock jock” engaged in mere sensationalism. His visceral depictions of sex and violence have social, psychological, and religious significance. Keesey takes issue with reviewers who accuse Palahniuk of being an angry nihilist and a misanthrope, showing instead that he is really a romantic at heart and a believer in community. In this first comprehensive introduction to Palahniuk’s fiction, Keesey reveals how this writer’s outrageous narratives are actually rooted in his own personal experiences, how his seemingly unprecedented works are part of the American literary tradition of protagonists in search of an identity, and how his negative energy is really social satire directed at specific ills that he diagnoses and wishes to cure. After tracing the influence of his working-class background, his journalistic education, and his training as a “minimalist” writer, Understanding Chuck Palahniuk exposes connections between the writer’s novels by grouping them thematically: the struggle for identity (Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, Survivor, Choke); the horror trilogy (Lullaby, Diary, Haunted); teen terrors (Rant, Pygmy); porn bodies and romantic myths (Snuff, Tell-All, Beautiful You); and a decidedly unorthodox revision of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Damned, Doomed).Drawing on numerous author interviews and written in an engaging and accessible style, Understanding Chuck Palahniuk should appeal to scholars, students, and fans alike.

Read more less

Book SynopsisUnderstanding Gary Shteyngart, the first comprehensive examination of Shteyngart’s novels and memoir, introduces readers to one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful contemporary American authors. Born in Leningrad in 1972, Shteyngart immigrated to the United States in 1979, attended Oberlin College and the City University of New York, and currently teaches in the Writing Program at Columbia University. His novels include Super Sad True Love Story, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize; Absurdistan, chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review and Time magazine; and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. Geoff Hamilton studies three broad, overlapping elements of Shteyngart’s work: his construction of Russian-Jewish identity in the United States, his appraisal of communism’s imaginative legacy for the wider East European diaspora and former Soviet republics, and his representation of the deadening effects of late capitalism. Focusing on Shteyngart’s themes of the fracturing and decay of ethnic identities, the limits and pitfalls of multiculturalism, and the decline of privacy and civility against the creeping power of technological mediation, Hamilton also tracks the author’s playful manipulation of literary traditions and his incisive revision of seminal mythologies of Russian, Jewish, and American selfhood. Although Shteyngart has sometimes been pigeon-holed as an immigrant author working a rather marginal ethnic shtick, Hamilton demonstrates that Shteyngart’s work deserves attention for its remarkable centrality, that is, its relevance to core questions of identity formation and the conditions of belief common to globalized societies.

Read more less

Book Synopsis Song of Exile: A Cultural History of Brazil's Most Popular Poem, 1846–2018 is the first comprehensive study of the influence of Antônio Gonçalves Dias's "Canção do exílio." Written in Coimbra, Portugal, in 1843 by a homesick student longing for Brazil, "Song of Exile" has inspired thousands of parodies and pastiches, and new variations continue to appear to this day. Every generation of Brazilian writers has adapted the poem's Romantic verses to glorify the wonders of the nation or to criticize it via parody, exposing a litany of issues that have plagued the country's progress over the years. Based on a core of five hundred texts painstakingly gathered over a five-year span, this book catalogs the networks of the poem's reinvention as pastiche and parody in Brazilian print culture from nineteenth-century periodicals to new media. Mapping the reoccurrences of the original's keywords and phrases over time, the book uncovers how the poem has been used by successive generations to write and rewrite the nation's history. This process of reinvention has guaranteed the permanency of "Song of Exile" in Brazilian culture, making it not only the nation's most popular poem, but one of the most imitated in the world.Table of Contents Acknowledgments Chapter One: "Minha terra tem palmeiras" : A Brief Introduction to Brazil's Most Popular Poem Chapter Two: "Adeus Coimbra inimiga": Precedents and Contexts Chapter Three: "Onde canta o rouxinol": Early Portuguese Responses Chapter Four: "Onde canta o periquito": The First Republic to the Vargas Era (1889–1945) Chapter Five: "Minha terra só tem tanques": The Military Regime (1964–1985) Chapter Six: "As sirenes que aqui apitam": Twenty-First-Century Songs of Exile (1999–2015) Chapter Seven: "Sou ali": Variations by Female Authors (1867–2015) Chapter Eight: "As aves que aqui twittam": Twitter, Instagram, and Beyond Chapter Nine: The Word, the Database, and the Algorithm Afterword: Literary Research as Data Art: An Experiment in Critical Reading (Manuel Portela) Appendix: Table of 500 Texts Notes Works Cited Index

Read more less