Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000 Books

Book SynopsisIn her third and final volume on Virginia Woolf's diaries, Barbara Lounsberry reveals new insights about the courageous last years of the modernist writer's life, from 1929 until Woolf's suicide in 1941. Woolf turned more to her diary for support in these years as she engaged in inner artistic wars.Trade ReviewBarbara Lounsberry has done for Woolf's diaries what the diaries once did for Woolf's novels, and what all great literary criticism seeks to do: It takes a canonical work of literature and offers an entirely new way of seeing it."— New Republic"Lounsberry uses these [diaries] to demonstrate that as fascism flourished and dear friends died, diaries—as a lifeline and a path forward—became integral to both Woolf's doing and her undoing. . . . Essential."—Choice"In her comprehensive, close readings of Woolf's entire diary, Lounsberry significantly advances scholarship on Woolf's most sustained literary endeavor. . . . Lounsberry enhances our understanding of the diary as a genre informed by its own traditions, aesthetics, and intertextual networks throughout history. She also showcases how Woolf's diary is itself a work of art."—Review of English Studies

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Book SynopsisChallenging the assumption that modernist writer Gertrude Stein seldom integrated her Jewish identity and heritage into her work, this book uncovers Stein’s constant and varied writing about Jewish topics throughout her career.

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Book SynopsisThe first book to explore the role of disability in the writings of James Joyce, this volume approaches the subject both on a figurative level, as a symbol or metaphor in Joyce’s work, and also as a physical reality for many of Joyce’s characters.Trade Review“A go-to source for researchers interested in modernism and disability studies. It makes concrete something we’ve always known instinctively: that Joyce’s interest in representing non-normative subject positions was ongoing rather than short-lived, extensive rather than selective.”—Vike Martina Plock, author of Joyce, Medicine, and Modernity“Addresses the major texts of Joyce, and is impressive and original in its scope. The scholarship collected here intersects with illness studies and trauma studies, and nuances our thinking about disability and disablism by way of complex, creative, and exciting readings. A book like this needs to exist.”—Janine Utell, author of James Joyce and the Revolt of Love: Marriage, Adultery, Desire

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Book SynopsisOffers an in-depth comparative study of two classic literary works, examining essential themes such as change, the self, and humans’ dependence on and isolation from others. Stephanie Nelson shows that in these texts, both Joyce and Homer address identity by looking at the paradox of time - that people are constantly changing yet remain the same.

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Book SynopsisA study of the early years of the Field Day Theatre Company, which has been a vital presence on the Irish cultural and intellectual scene since its inception in 1980. Drawing on reviews, pre-production publicity and personal interviews, it discusses Field Day's evolving aims and achievements.Trade ReviewThe strengths of Richtarik's study lie in its undoubted enthusiasm for, and belief in, the potential of theatre; in its meticulously researched detail; and in its concentration on the contradictions within Field Day. - Irish Review

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Book SynopsisA novel about the human need for purpose, for a truth by which to live and for which to die. It is a novel about faith and idolatry, love and death, freedom and bondage, nature and grace. Put another way, it is about how human beings cannot escape the great challenge of salvation, of breaking free from false, man made gods.

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Book SynopsisIncludes essays that approach Peter Pan from literary, dramatic, film, television, and sociological perspectives and, in the process, analyze his emergence and preservation in the cultural imagination.Trade ReviewWhether a Victorian, Edwardian, or twenty-first-century postmodern, earthbound adults of all ages will find Second Star to the Right an engaging and illuminating collection. -- Thomas Doherty * Brandeis University *"This fresh and original collection of essays offers a deeper understanding of Peter Pan as an icon and cultural phenomenon."IDENTIFY BY AFFILIATION (SEE BELOW) OR BY PUBLICATION--EDITOR OF THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY ENCYCLOPEDIA OF CHILDREN'S LITERATURE -- Jack Zipes * University of Minnesota *Perhaps responding to the modern phenomenon known as Peter Pan syndrome, Kavey and Friedman collect nine excellent essays that explore the social and artistic impacts of J.M. Barrie's classic tale over the past century. Recommended. * Choice *Table of ContentsIntroduction: From peanut butter to the silver screen / Allison B. Kavey Tinker Bell, the fairy of electricity / Murray Pomerance "To die will be an awfully big adventure": Peter Pan in Word War I / Linda Robertson "I do believe in fairies, I do, I do": the history and epistemology of Peter Pan / Allison B. Kavey "Shadow of [a] girl": an examination of Peter Pan in performance / Patrick B. Tuite Peter Pan and the possibilities of child literature / Martha Stoddard Holmes Disney's Peter Pan: gender, fantasy, and industrial production / Susan Ohmer Hooked on Pan: Barrie's immortal pirate in fiction and film / Lester D. Friedman "Gay, innocent, and heartless": Peter Pan and the queering of popular culture / David P.D. Munns Peter and me (or how I learned to fly): network television broadcasts of Peter Pan / Theresa Jones

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Book SynopsisExplores one of the major issues in Holocaust studies - the intersection of memory and ethics in artistic expression, particularly within literature. This work examines the shifting cultural contexts for Holocaust representation and reveals how writers articulate the shadowy borderline between fact and fiction, and between event and expression.Trade Review"Bringing together some of the best known thinkers in the field of Holocaust literary studies, this volume will quickly become required reading for advanced undergraduates, graduate students and scholars of the Shoah."— Irene Kacandes, co-editor of Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust "A provocative and engaging volume." — Holocaust and Genocide StudiesTable of ContentsPreface Introduction Part One. Is the Holocaust Still to Be Written? The Holocaust, History Writing, and the Role of Fiction Nostalgia and the Holocaust Death in Language Oskar Rosenfeld and Historiographic Realism (including Sex, Shit, and Status) Part Two. A Question for Aesthetics? Nazi Aesthetics in Historical Context Writing Ruins "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem" Part Three. Does Culture Influence Memory? The Holocaust and the Economy of Memory, from Bellow to Morrison (The Technique of Figurative Allegory) "And in the Distance You Hear Music, a Band Playing" Reading Heart of Darkness after the Holocaust Theorizing the Perpetrator in Bernhard Schlink's The Reader and Martin Amis's Time's Arrow

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Book SynopsisAlan Nadel explores influential non-fiction books, magazine articles, and public documents to demonstrate how films such as Singin’ in the Rain, On the Waterfront, Sunset Boulevard, Roman Holiday, North by Northwest, and Sayonara, negotiated anxieties over the changes impelled by postwar America’s radically reconfigured population. Trade Review"Demographic Angst convincingly places movies at the center of complex cultural tensions and shifts within post-World War II America. Nadel's discussion of this topic is unprecedented." -- Timothy Corrigan * co-author of The Film Experience: An Introduction *"Demographic Angst offers an encyclopedic account of questions central to modern American culture and society. There is no doubt that the lessons of this book are now more urgent than ever before." -- Kate Baldwin * author of Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red *"The fun and interest of this book, despite its account of a grim post WWII American angst, comes in the unusual combination of films at play: from Singin in the Rain to The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, from Lina Lamont to Norma Desmond to Margo Channing, Nadel’s insightful study reveals the bizarre disquiet of an age in which men could only preserve their innocence by putting women in their place." -- Linda Williams * author of On The Wire *"Revisiting the early Cold War period, Demographic Angst offers illuminating historical perspectives on a dozen classic films. Well researched and always engaging, this is a perfect meeting of American studies and film studies." -- Steven Cohan * author of The Sound of Musicals *"Explores newly emergent cultural anxieties as worked through in such films as Singin' in the Rain, On the Waterfront, and Sunset Boulevard." * Chronicle *"Engaging and thought-provoking." * Philadelphia Inquirer *"Nadel’s meticulously worked out argument puts Maher’s casual polemic on a solid foundation. As much as the book promises to enjoy longevity as an intelligent, well-informed, and insightful study of America in the Fifties, taking its place among landmarks studies like May’s Homeward Bound, critical understanding of Fifties-style identity politics as Nadel presents it in Demographic Angst might also inform the debate of contemporary politics—a politics which, incidentally, is similarly rife with “demographic angst” as that in the Fifties." * Cercles *Table of ContentsPreface 1. The Character of Post–World War II America 2. Singin’ in the (HUAC) Rain: Job Security, Stardom, and the Abjection of Lena Lamont 3. It’s All about Eve 4. “What Starts Like a Scary Tale . . .”: The Right to Work On the Waterfront 5. “Life Could Not Better Be”: Disorganized Labor, the Little Man, and The Court Jester 6. Citizens of the Free World Unite: International Tourism and Postwar Identity in Roman Holiday, The Teahouse of the August Moon, and Sayonara 7. Expedient Exaggeration and the Scale of Cold War Farce in North by Northwest 8. Defiant Desegregation with No (Liberal) Way Out 9. “I Want to Be in America”: Urban Integration, Pan-American Friendship, and West Side Story Acknowledgments Filmography Notes Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisMichael Hoberman combines literary history and geography to restore Jewish American writers to their roles as critical members of the American literary landscape from the 1850s to the present, and to argue that Jewish history, American literary history, and the inhabitation of American geography are, and always have been, contiguous entities. Trade Review"Michael Hoberman has opened up freshly the pathway in Jewish American writings about the sense of place, how Jewish life in America has come to be and feel at home." -- Jules Chametzky * professor, University of Massachusetts-Amherst; founder and editor of The Massachusetts Review *"At once critically imaginative and rigorously methodological, A Hundred Acres of America is a genuinely exciting, pathbreaking work of breathtaking historical, geographical, and cultural scope." -- Ranen Omer-Sherman * JHFE Endowed Chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Louisville *"Hoberman brilliantly revises notions of how quintessentially American landscapes shaped American Jewish writing. Elegantly written and cogently argued, this study unsettles the stories we think we know about Jewish immigration and territorial belonging in America." -- Rachel Rubinstein * author of Members of the Tribe: Native America in the Jewish Imagination *"A Hundred Acres is a worthy and lucid genealogy of the under-explored Jewish American geographical imagination, presented convincingly as an engagement with as well as departure from certain forms of dominant U.S. spatiality. Hoberman's nimble treatment of key texts captures the Jewish stamp on iconic American places, from 'the frontier' to the city and the 'suburban pastoral' as well as the Americanization of Jewish spaces elsewhere and, importantly, contributes to a shift in Jewish American literary scholarship away from the classic topics of immigration and assimilation toward a multidimensional criticism." -- Dalia Kandiyoti * author of Migrant Sites: America, Place, and Diaspora Literatures *"The Jewish Preview of Books—December 2018" by Rachel Scheinerman * The Jewish Review of Books *"The book discusses a variety of places important to Americans, including the evolving West of the 19th century, the small towns of the Midwest and 20th-century suburbia. It ends with a landscape that has been significant to the Jewish people for thousands of years: Israel [and] suggests that the works it examines ask questions that aren’t easy to answer — but then asking hard questions is a sign of good literature." * Greenfield Reporter *"Highly recommended." * Choice *"Hoberman Reads from Book," mention in The Shelburne Falls and West County Independent * The Shelburne Falls/West County Independent *"June 8-9, 2019: Jewish American Journeys: Michael Hoberman’s Books" http://americanstudier.blogspot.com/2019/06/june-8-9-2019-jewish-american-journeys.html * American Studies Blog *"Hoberman’s study...chal­lenges us to recon­sid­er what the canon of our lit­er­a­ture ought to be in a series of orig­i­nal read­ings of both obscure and major fig­ures whose vision of land­scape — above all sites of mem­o­ry and myth — shaped their vision of Amer­i­ca in rich and strik­ing ways." * Jewish Book Council *"Carefully chosen, sensitively read, historically contextualized, and situated within the broader currents of American literature....An apt reminder that Jews’ engagement with place has always been fraught and that the places that we take for granted are always in the midst of being imagined and invented, a process that is almost never innocent." * Marginalia *"Hoberman engages effectively with many important voices in the study of Jewish American literature today. [A] stimulating study that significantly refigures Jewish American literature." * American Studies in Scandinavia *"The richness of Hoberman’s work is partly a feature of its extensive chronology, which includes 150 years of literary history, and partly due to his careful comparisons that are geographically, literarily, religiously and culturally diverse and bring together an uncommon range of places, authors, texts, and histories. Hoberman offers a fresh perspective on a body of literature." * MELUS *"Short, smart, and pithy." * Shofar *"Jews Out West 18th-century Jewish American writers described America’s vastness in lyrical—and liturgical—terms" by Michael Hoberman * Tablet Magazine *""Heterogeneous, well-researched, and well-written." * American Jewish History *"American Pastorals" by Michael Hoberman * Tablet Magazine *Table of ContentsContents Preface Introduction. “A Never Failing Source of Interest to Us”: Jewish American Literature and the Sense of Place—1-13 Chapter One. “In this vestibule of God’s holy temple”: the frontier accounts of Solomon Carvalho and Israel Joseph Benjamin, 1857-1862—14-55 Chapter Two. Colonial revival in the immigrant city: the invention of Jewish American urban history, 1870-1910—56-98 Chapter Three. “A rare good fortune to anyone”: Joseph Leiser’s and Edna Ferber’s reminiscences of small-town Jewish life, 1909-1939—99-144 Chapter Four. “The longed for pastoral”: images of exurban exile in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997) and Allegra Goodman’s Kaaterskill Falls (1998)—145-186 Chapter Five. Return to the shtetl: following the “topological turn” in Rebecca Goldstein’s Mazel (1995) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated (2002)—187-227 Chapter Six. Turning dreamscapes into landscapes on the “Wild West Bank” frontier: Jon Papernick’s The Ascent of Eli Israel (2002) and Risa Miller’s Welcome to Heavenly Heights (2003)—228-266 Conclusion. Mystical encounters and ordinary places—267-276 Acknowledgements Notes Index

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Book SynopsisThe complete poems of Leopold Sedar Senghor, possibly Africa's most famous poet, are offered in translation in this bilingual French/English edition. The book, representing the culmination of a lifetime's work, includes ""Lost Poems"", a collection of Senghor's earliest work.

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Book SynopsisIn 1957 and 1958, William Faulkner was Writer-in-Residence at University of Virginia. This volume includes what he said at 37 conferences where he answered over 2000 questions on a wide range of concerns, from exegetic problems in his novels to the role of the writer in modern society.

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Book SynopsisLeopold Sedar Senghor was President of the Republic of Senegal from 1960 to 1981, but he is also considered one of Africa's foremost poets. This bilingual volume collects his complete poetic works.

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Book SynopsisThis volume brings together Melvin B. Tolson's three book of poetry - ""Rendezvouz with America"", ""Libretto for the Republic of Liberia"", and ""Harlem Gallery"" - as well as fugitive poems after 1944.

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Book SynopsisA study of post-slavery literatures in the Americas. Examining major novels from 1880 to the 1970s, the author shows how fiction from different nations shares what he calls textual simultaneity in revealing parallel narrative anxieties about genealogy, narrative authority and racial difference.

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Book SynopsisFaced with the failure of the romantic muse and the other two-sex tropes for the imagination, writers such as James Joyce, William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf became attracted to a culturally specific notion of an androgynous imagination. This text explores the process by which this happened.

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Book SynopsisAs expatriates in Germany and Austria in the 1930s, Kay Boyle, Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Stafford and Lillian Hellman saw the rise of Nazi ideology firsthand. In this volume Thomas Austenfeld restores ethics and politics to the central places they held in the lives and work of these women.Trade ReviewMuch has been written of late regarding modernist writers-almost always men such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot-who either colluded with fascist leaders or who expressed sentiments that were sometimes alarmingly fascist in nature. With its emphasis on women, politics, and ethics, American Women Writers and the Nazis provides a needed and intriguing chapter on the relationship of American writers to one of the most devastating political movements of the modern era-indeed, of any era.-Will Brantley, author of Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir: Smith, Glasgow, Welty, Hellman, Porter, and Hurston

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Book SynopsisArguing that the aesthetic practices of 20th-century French Caribbean writers reconstruct an historical awareness once lost amid colonial exploitation, Nesbitt shows how these writers use the critical force of the aesthetic imagination to transform the parameters of the Antillean experience.

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Book SynopsisThese papers from the poet and critic Randall Jarrell include letters from Jarrell to Peter Taylor, publication of which was withheld during Taylor's lifetime. These letters add a further dimension of friendship and intellect to this behind-the-scenes glimpse of American literary history.Trade ReviewWitty, often brilliantly perceptive, often touching, usually funny, [these letters] have many of the best qualities of Randall Jarrell's criticism and his comic novel, Pictures from an Institution. They bristle with ideas while they also show great freshness and openness to experience.... Of recent collections of letters, only Flannery O'Connor's seem to me to rival these in their consistently high level of interest and entertainment. - Washington Post Book World ""Randall Jarrell - poet, critic, daimon - was an Enthusiast. Wedding an intense devotion to Old World culture with the frequent exhibition of glad American anarchy, he was Matthew Arnold at the wheel of an MG, tach up, top down, the wind in his literary hair."" - Boston Globe ""Mary Jarrell... has written witty and observant connecting passages that shape the book into a rounded narrative and... has unveiled Randall Jarrell's final enduring literary work. And in doing so, she has created her own."" - Charlotte Observer

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Book SynopsisA reconstruction of three modernist poets' dialogue with the Chinese masters, this sequel to ""Orientalism and Modernism"", investigates the ways in which three modernist poets received Chinese artistic notions and assimilated them into their literary masterpieces.Trade ReviewThe Modernist Response to Chinese Art is a work of both erudition and sympathy that reveals the root of modernist poets' otherwise baffling interest in and use of Chinese art. Most impressive, perhaps, is the depth of their embrace of it, as Qian has so convincingly documented. - Patricia C. Willis, Yale University, author of Marianne Moore; ""Qian provides a scrupulously scholarly and valuable study - a goldmine of important and useful facts and insights."" - Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University, author of Twenty-first-Century Modernism: The ""New"" Poetics; ""Enormously impressive, The Modernist Response to Chinese Art will be highly useful to all levels of readers in Pound, Moore, and Stevens, and absolutely indispensable to scholars sorting out the development of the three poets' work."" - Ronald Bush, St. John's College, Oxford, author of The Genesis of Ezra Pound's Cantos

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Book SynopsisPollard looks to recent Caribbean poetry as a means of reassessing modernism's cosmopolitanism; in particular, his book redefines the cosmopolitan influence of T. S. Eliot's modernism by examining how his ideas have been transformed by the two leading Anglophone Caribbean poets, Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite.Trade ReviewNew World Modernisms makes a contribution that is both substantial and significant to scholarship in two spheres: Anglophone Caribbean literature in the larger context of postcolonial theory, and modernism. A stimulating and provocative book. - Laurence Breiner, Professor of English, Boston University, author of An Introduction to West Indian Poetry

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Book SynopsisExamining the role of the imagination in the modern and postmodern periods, this book looks at the fable as a narrative form that addresses the ultimate questions of how to live and why. It calls for a reconsideration of 'theory as thinking' for the future of philosophy, religious studies, and literature.Trade ReviewThis is a brilliant and original book. I am impressed with the depth and seriousness of Taylor's work and the clarity by which he accomplishes it. Taylor has moved into the first rank of 'theological' readers of the literary text and the creative process. - Sander L. Gilman, Emory University, author of Multiculturalism and the Jews ""Taylor's Para-Inquiry was groundbreaking in its own right, but this new work is far more encompassing, sensitive to cutting-edge themes and developments in Continental philosophy and cultural studies, and prepared to take these trajectories to a new level. The marriage of postmodernist theory and religious theory has not been seriously proposed, and Taylor is the first to do so in a significant as well as serious way."" - Carl Raschke, University of Denver, author of The Next Reformation

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Book SynopsisExposes the queer dynamics embedded in myths of the southern plantation. This book reveals how various models of queer egalitarianism attempt to reconcile the plantation's regional legacies with national debates about equality and democracy, particularly during the eras of the New Deal, World War II, and the civil rights movement.Trade ReviewThrough deft textual analysis, relevant historical and literary research, and a firm grasp of the implications of queer theory for this subject, Michael Bibler makes a strong case for the capacity of same-sex relations in plantation novels (relations which may be homosocial, homoerotic, and/or homosexual) to undermine the rigidities of those perspectives that represent this literature exclusively in terms of ideologies of racial, sexual, and class difference. Cotton's Queer Relations serves as the foundation for a new and effective approach to the problem of social inequalities in southern literature. - Barbara Ladd, Emory University, author of Resisting History: Gender, Modernity, and Authorship in William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty ""Michael Bibler opens - I should say pries open - a new door in southern studies. Behind this door is a body of writing that presents homosexuality as both a fact of nature and a construct that works to maintain the South's hierarchical power structures. With its focus on the southern plantation and its ongoing representations in literature and popular culture, Cotton's Queer Relations illuminates a crucial but often ignored irony: The South's seemingly official desire to make homosexuality disappear actually speaks to the region's inability to stifle the expression of homosexual desire."" - Will Brantley, Middle Tennessee State University, author of Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir

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Book SynopsisDraws a correlation between the American fashion industry and early twentieth-century literature. As American fashion diverged from a class-conscious industry governed by Parisian designers to become more commercial and democratic, Lauren S. Cardon argues, fashion designers and journalists began appropriating the same themes of self-transformation to market new fashion trends.Trade ReviewLauren Cardon gives us a broad-spectrum study of how we read, manipulate, blend, and perform fashion in American society and literature. She deftly moves from theory to practice, placing novelists and designers of the Gilded Age in the context of current conversations about the many meanings of fashion. Seeing new patterns in familiar novels, Cardon stitches together a book that is lush, smart, and a joy to read."" — Katherine Joslin, Western Michigan University, author of Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion

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Book SynopsisIn response to the devastating trauma of World War I, British and American authors wrote about grief. The need to articulate loss inspired moving novels by Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. Erin Penner shows how these two modernist novelists took on the challenge of rewriting the literature of mourning for a new and difficult era.

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Book SynopsisIn response to the devastating trauma of World War I, British and American authors wrote about grief. The need to articulate loss inspired moving novels by Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. Erin Penner shows how these two modernist novelists took on the challenge of rewriting the literature of mourning for a new and difficult era.Trade ReviewThis is a book well worth reading for Penner’s rich analyses of individual novels, for her extensive knowledge of previous scholarship, and for her reframing of Woolf and Faulkner as writers who should be in conversation and who push us to bring conversations about the form and the ethics of mourning into our present-day world." - Woolf Studies Annual

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Book SynopsisVolume two of this monumental work rests on an unprecedented trove of research, giving us the most penetrating and comprehensive life of William Faulkner and providing a fascinating look at the author's trajectory from under-appreciated ""writer's writer"" to world-renowned Nobel laureate and literary icon.Trade ReviewA lush story of a genius and his substantial achievements, failures, and demons.- Kirkus, starred review;""The concluding volume of this two-part biography of Faulkner shows Rollyson, a Baruch College professor emeritus, as both a careful observer of Faulkner the man, and an adept and perceptive reader of his work.... Rollyson's painstakingly researched and beautifully written biography should be a touchstone for Faulkner scholarship for years to come.""- Publishers Weekly, starred review

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Book SynopsisOffers a critical new perspective on Philip Roth's work by exploring it in the era of autofiction, highly charged racial reckonings, and the #MeToo movement. The book poses provocative new questions about the author, and examines Roth's work in the context of race, revealing how it often trafficked in stereotypes.Trade ReviewDespite long-standing attention paid Roth by literary critics, theorists, and commentators, The Philip Roth We Don’t Know is a startlingly refreshing and astoundingly comprehensive intervention in the field known as Roth studies. Berlinerblau asks that we take the long view, one that is rich in nuance, vigorous in its attention to broader trends and experiences, and one that doesn’t shy away from asking difficult, challenging, and even painful questions." - Jessica Lang, Baruch College of CUNY, author of Textual Silence: Unreadability and the Holocaust"[A] fresh account of the literary legacy of the award-winning and controversial author.... Intriguing new perspectives on a contentious writer." - Kirkus Reviews

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Book SynopsisA collection of modern Hebrew poetry. In this new and expanded edition of a volume first printed in 1965, a new generation of Hebrew poets is added. Each poem appears in both its original Hebrew and an English phonetic transcription, along with a commentary and a literal English translation.

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Book SynopsisExplores self-consciousness and metafictional awareness in modern fairy tale and its expression across literary fairy tale, popular fairy tale, and fairy-tale film. This title argues draws on the critical fields of postmodernism, narratological analysis, stucturalism, feminism, and performativity, without relying solely on any one perspective.

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Book SynopsisArgues that humour performs political, cultural, and social functions in the wake of horror. David Slucki, Gabriel Finder and Avinoam Patt have assembled an impressive list of contributors who examine what is at stake in deploying humor in representing the Holocaust. Namely, what are the boundaries?

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Book Synopsis2007 Choice Outstanding Academic TitleAt the funeral of Matthew Shepardthe young Wyoming man brutally murdered for being gaythe Reverend Fred Phelps led his parishioners in protest, displaying signs with slogans like Matt Shepard rots in Hell, Fags Die God Laughs, and God Hates Fags. In counter-protest, activists launched an angel action, dressing in angel costumes, with seven-foot high wings, and creating a visible barrier so one would not have to see the hateful signs.Though long thought of as one of the most virulently anti-gay genres of contemporary American politics and culture, in God Hates Fags, Michael Cobb maintains that religious discourses have curiously figured as the most potent and pervasive forms of queer expression and activism throughout the twentieth century. Cobb focuses on how queers have assumed religious rhetoric strategically to respond to the violence done against them, alternating close readings of writings by James Baldwin, TennessTrade ReviewGod Hates Fags is an excellent way to become immersed in the issues and rhetorical arguments of a sub-cultural world of American religious and political disourse. -- Richard Hughes Seager * American Studies Journal *God Hates Fags is an exciting, even exceptional, book, and it will contribute to an important and necessary conversation between queer studies and African American literary and cultural studies. -- Christopher Nealon,author of Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion Before StonewallLooks specifically at texts and spectacles about religious violence and hatred. -- Julie Novkov,University at Albany, SUNYMichael Cobb raises questions of both ethics and effectiveness that are deeply urgent. If you, too, want to know how the rhetorics of violence that swirl around queer people work, then read this book. -- Janet R. Jakobsen,co-author of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious ToleranceI am moved by it, as by his practiced rhetorical sensibility. * Journal of the American Academy of Religion *[Cobb] begins not only in the middle of still fresh news (Matthew Shepard, Fred Phelps, Colorados Amendment 2, and the marriage debates), but in the middle of ordinary assumptions about rhetoric and our east elision of sexuality with race. * Journal of the American Academy of Religion *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: The Last Safe Group to Hate 1 The Language of National Security: A Queer Theory of Religious Language 2 James Baldwin and His Queer, Religious Words 3 Like a Prayer 4 Rights as Wrongs Conclusion: Our Aberrant Future NotesIndex About the Author

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Book SynopsisExamines classic and contemporary Jewish and African American children's literatureThrough close readings of selected titles published since 1945, Jodi Eichler-Levine analyzes what is at stake in portraying religious history for young people, particularly when the histories in question are traumatic ones. In the wake of the Holocaust and lynchings, of the Middle Passage and flight from Eastern Europe''s pogroms, children's literature provides diverse and complicated responses to the challenge of representing difficultcollective pasts.In reading the work of various prominent authors, including Maurice Sendak, Julius Lester, Jane Yolen, Sydney Taylor, and Virginia Hamilton, Eichler-Levine changes our understanding of North American religions. She illuminates how narratives of both suffering and nostalgia graft future citizens into ideals of American liberal democracy, and into religious communities that can be understood according to recognizable notions of reTrade ReviewExhibits an impressive command of multiple disciplines to offer a compelling of reading of Jewish and African American childrens literatures. . . . Eichler-Levine's close readings of youth literatures and reader responses are always clear and often delightful as she deftly works at the crossroads, providing new signposts for navigating vexing questions at the intersections of religion, citizenship, trauma, and redemption. -- Liora Gubkin,author of You Shall Tell Your Children: Holocaust Memory in American Passover RitualJodi Eichler-Levines insightful book illuminates the importance of fear and suffering in shaping African American and Jewish childrens literature. Her book gives a cogent understanding of how each community's difficult historical narratives coupled with their religious and social lives have helped to prepare children to engage an American civic life that has been hostile at times to their ethnic groups. -- Anthea Butler,University of PennsylvaniaThis rich and rewarding study invites fresh thought about the political religiosity of stories for children and the potential of contemporary children's literature to help forge a new politics of American childhood. -- Amy Fish * Children's Literature *Whats so exciting about Suffer the Little Children is that it brings a deeply grounded religious studies perspective to bear on contemporary American childrens literature in ways that enrich both the study of literature and our understanding of childhoods role in U.S. Judeo-Christian cultures. By focusing on American childrens books by and about Jews and African Americans and the core tropes that interweave through these textsfrom the idea of 'chosenness' to the haunting spectre of genocideEichler-Levine gives new meaning to the idea of the `sacralized child. Suffer the Little Children sheds new light on the relationships between race, religion, citizenship, and childhood. It also reminds us once more of why childrens literature provides such a revealing lens for analyzing American culture. -- Julia Mickenberg * Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the U.S. *In this startling analysis of children's literature written by African Americans, Jews, and African American Jews, Eichler-Levine (religion/Jewish studies, Univ. of Wisconsin, Oshkosh) claims that 'redemptive' stories about victimization are a necessary part of these works in order to gain acceptance. * Choice *Eichler-Levine exhibits mastery of this genre in a scholarly, comprehensive book that brings a literate, impassioned, interrogative analytical lens to familiar and lesser known children's books. * Catholic Library World *Jodi Eichler-Levine sets out to make the connections between African American and Jewish childrens literature, a potentially fruitful area of study because of the two groups shared inheritance of similar Biblical stories. * Children's Literature Association Quarterly *Eichler-Levine's appreciation for the art and transcendent possibility of children's books will inspire other scholars of religion, American history, and literature to pick up childhood favorites. In so doing,Suffer the Little Childrenpromises to spark a broader investigation of the wide-ranging contributions Jewish writers have made to this understudied literary tradition. * American Jewish History *Table of ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgments Introduction: Wild Things and Chosen Children A Word about Language 1 Remembering the Way into Membership Part I: Crossing and Dwelling:After lives of Moses and Miriam 2 The Unbearable Lightness of Exodus 3 Dwelling in Chosen Nostalgia Part II: Binding and Unbinding:Hauntings of Isaac and Jephthah's Daughter4 Bound to Violence: Lynching, the Holocaust, and the Limits of Representation 5 Unbound in Fantasy: Reading Monstrosity and the Supernatural Conclusion: The Abrahamic Bargain Appendix: Children's Books Notes Bibliography Index About the Author

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Book SynopsisThough American crime novels are often derided for containing misogynistic attitudes and limiting ideas of masculinity, Greg Forter maintains that they are instead psychologically complex and sophisticated works that demand closer attention. Eschewing the synthetic methodologies of earlier work on crime fiction, Murdering Masculinities argues that the crime novel does not provide a consolidated and stable notion of masculinity. Rather, it demands that male readers take responsibility for the desires they project on to these novels. Forter examines the narrative strategies of five novels--Hammett''s The Glass Key, Cain''s Serenade, Faulkner''s Sanctuary, Thompson''s Pop. 1280, and Himes''s Blind Man with a Pistol--in conjunction with their treatment of bodily metaphors of smell, vision, and voice. In the process, Forter unearths a generic unconscious that reveals things Freud both discovered and sought to repress.Trade ReviewMurdering Masculinities makes a sophisticated, substantial contribution to contemporary debates about gender and sexuality. It pays closer, more intelligent, and more sustained attention to the crime novels it considers than has been paid them before, and it not only engages an impressive range of psychoanalytic thinkers, but contributes significantly to the development and refinement of psychoanalytic theory. -- Tim Dean,University of Illinois, Urbana-ChampaignSumptuous, elegant, nuanced, and accessible, Greg Forter's Murdering Masculinities helps us to remember what language can do. But Forter minces more than words in this provocative new book. He offers a transformative reading of American crime fiction, arguing that it is not to high modernism that we should look for the reinvention of gender, but rather to the ‘low' works of authors like James Cain, Chester Himes, Dashiell Hammett, Jim Thompson, and William Faulkner. -- Kaja Silverman

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Book SynopsisTheodore Dreiser is indisputably one of America's most important twentieth-century novelists. An American Tragedy, Sister Carrie, and Jennie Gerhardt have all made an indelible mark on the American literary landscape. This title offers an original interpretations of Dreiser's works.

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Book SynopsisGathers almost twenty years of New York City's smartest and most explosive-as well as hard to find- writing, providing an indispensable archive of one of the most exciting artistic scenes in U.S. History.Trade Review"This is a kind of three-decade book celebrating the possibilities of a self-sufficient writing community right under the nose of the decaying, increasingly irrelevant, empire of New York publishing." * American Book Review *"Up Is Up itself has a scrapbook feel. It gathers poems, excerpts and short stories as well as handmade magazine covers, pamphlets and posters that capture the collaborative, on-the-fly spirit of the period. . . . What is most arresting about UP IS UP is not its discovery of any individual genius but its invocation of an electrifying social energy that helped blast out an intellectual space for then-& transgressive female and gay writers." * New York Times Book Review *"Up Is Up is a remarkable monument to the vibrancy of the Downtown scene. There are moments of romantic myth-making, dysfunctional beauty and hilarious profundity. It documents a now-gone era when lower Manhattan was an affordable oasis for artists, writers and musicians, when poetry and prose rubbed up against punk and visual art before drunkenly stumbling into an endless pansexual orgy." * New York Press *"Exhilarating. . . . Up Is Up reproduces flyers and pages from lit mags to convey downtown’s heady DIY ethos. The writing itself displays sensibilities that are at once fiery and cool. Cookie Mueller, Dennis Cooper, Wojnarowicz and many others merge crackling prose and a matter-of-fact tone to burrow into disturbing corners of sexual desire. AIDS takes a serious toll in the ’80s, and becomes the haunting focus in amazing selections by novelist Gary Indiana and poet Tim Dlugos. Even as the scene begins to wind down, the book nails the deep thrills of talk and collaboration, especially in novelist Lynne Tillman’s complex rendering of two friends’ bar-set conversation. That gift for gab lives on in the epilogue, a spirited conversation between Eileen Myles and Cooper, who resist mythologizing but invoke the scene’s glory nonetheless." * Time Out New York *"Some of us like our angels with dirty faces; witness the lovingly reproduced artifacts of Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992, a comprehensive compendium of below-14th Street literary productions by everyone from Laurie Anderson to Nick Zedd, focusing on the output of small magazines of the era like Koff, Bomb, and Between C and D...[the] stories meld dry satire with heart-churningly desperate transmissions of damaged humanity." * Village Voice *Table of ContentsPart One: The 1970sPart Two: The 1980sPart Three: The 1990s

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Book SynopsisAnger and bitterness tend to pervade narratives written by second generation Asian American daughters, despite their largely unremarkable upbringings. The author explores this paradox, locating in the origins of these women's maddeningly immaterial suffering not only racial hegemonies but also the structure of the immigrant family itself.Trade ReviewDeftly cognizant of the relationship between the filial and the financial, Ingratitudeseamlessly moves between well-known works and less-discussed memoirs. This archive, explored over the course of four chapters, enables Ninh to 'reconstruct the processes by which diligent, docile immigrants' daughters are produced.' -- Cathy J. Schlund-Vials * College Literature *Ninh makes a valuable contribution to Asian American Studies as well as gender/women's studies when she brings critical insight to gender-specific readings of the Asian American daughter, exploring the nuances of how familial structures of feelings and structures of power construct and produce the disciplined, docile, and chaste daughter. -- Catherine H. Nguyen * Amerasia Journal *erin Khuê Ninh is insistent and persuasive in drawing our attention to the ways that race, economy, and power saturate the Asian American family and, within it, the place of daughters. Ingratitude is also an assertive, stylish, and elegant work of criticism, offering new insights into well-read texts while making the case for reading more closely lesser-known stories. -- Viet Nguyen,author of Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian AmericaIn considering Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950), Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976), Evelyn Lau's Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid (1989), Catherine Lau's Oriental Girls Desire Romance (1997), and other works, the author looks at intergenerational conflict as a ste of power, an inequality which Asian American subjectivity and identity has been constituted. -- J.R. Wendlanad * Choice *Ninh's study takes the figure of the second-generation Asian American daughter, familiar to most readers through the popular trope of the mother-daughter relationship, to brilliantly show how this figure necessitates a reading of the nuclear family as a special form of capitalist enterprise. * American Literature *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1 The Filial Debtor: Jade Snow Wong 2 Refractions of Harm: Maxine Hong Kingston 3 The Caring of Jailers: Evelyn Lau, Catherine Liu 4 Desirable Daughters: Fae Myenne Ng, Elaine Mar, Chitra Divakaruni Afterword: The Ending Notes Bibliography Acknowledgments Index About the Author

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Book SynopsisStarting with the birth of science fiction in Mary Shelley's ""Frankenstein"", Jane Donawerth examines science fiction and utopian literature written by women. She uses her reading of that work to pinpoint the gender problems that reside in the male-oriented science fiction genre.

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Book SynopsisUpdated and expanded for the third edition, this volume presents a comprehensive account of the development and influence of the American screenwriter.Trade ReviewA fascinating, entertaining romp through the forest of writing for films. You will encounter flora and fauna of the art and business of cinema dramaturgy. It is com­pulsory reading for professional and layman alike. Stempel offers the first general account of the development and influence of the American screenwriter. . . . He discusses hundreds of individual writers, the workings of the writing departments of the big studios during Hollywood’s heyday, the impact of McCarthyism and the blacklist on the profession. . . . A real cornerstone item for film studies collections and a genuinely, enjoyably readable one. Informal in style and anecdotal in approach, this perceptive account is filled with stories spotlighting writers’ creative work and their struggle to achieve recognition. Individual chapters on the narrative styles of the major studios offer fascinating evi­dence of the way in which a single producer could determine the structure of all scripts under his control. . . . An invaluable resource for anyone interested in film, popular culture, or twentieth-century American writing.

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Book SynopsisProbes the entangled lives, works, and passions of a political activist, a novelist, a screenwriter, and a movie actress who collaborated in 1920s New York City. Together they created the shape-shifting, genre-crossing Salome of the Tenements, first a popular novel and then a Hollywood movie.Trade ReviewThe Salome Ensemble reads like a novel. Ginsberg has written a thoroughly absorbing work of cultural and feminist history that restores to vivid life the lives and intertwined careers of four compelling and indomitable women.""—Ross Posnock, author of Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual""A fascinating story of four remarkable women who made their way through the ‘bewilderness’ of the United States at the start of the last century. Rose Pastor Stokes, Anzia Yezierska, Sonya Levien, and Jetta Goudal lived in a country churning with labor agitation, feminism, immigration, experimental literature, and the birth of Hollywood. Experiencing modernity in full, they represented that experience in fiction and film. In the process, they not only forged new identities as independent Jewish American women but also helped redefine what it meant to be an American.""—Casey Nelson Blake, director of the Center for American Studies, Columbia University""In four movements, an overture, and a coda, Ginsberg imaginatively blends into a single cultural analysis a novel by Anzia Yezierska, the story of Rose Pastor Stokes, which was one of Yezierska’s sources, the playscript by Sonya Levien, and the performance of Jetta Goudal, who acted the part of Salome of the Tenements on screen. Based on extensive research and accompanied by portraits, screen shots, and other illustrations, The Salome Ensemble retraces versions of an intermarriage story that was, paradoxically, both a Salome and a Cinderella tale.""—Werner Sollors, author of The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s

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Book SynopsisThis work applies Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of literary discourse and the concept of ""carnivalisation"" to the work of Flann O'Brien. The author emphasises the political and social implications of the writings, arguing that O'Brien maintained a reflexive focus on language throughout his career.

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Book SynopsisThis reference guide to Yeats' work, uses Yeats' non-poetic writing, the principle Yeats criticism and the writings of his friends and critics to reveal the depth of his meanings. It identifies geographical, historical and literary references from classical antiquity to Irish culture.

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