Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000 Books

Book SynopsisThis pathbreaking book offers stunning new insight into modern black literature, environmental humanities, and poetry and poetics.Trade ReviewThe black optimism that animates Posmentier's writing is also a prominent feature of the poems, songs, and works of visual art that she takes up as her primary objects of concern. Yet there is also, alongside this optimism, the ever-present specter of the end of the world—one that operates, always, right alongside the countless new worlds that black art necessarily engenders—which demands our attention.—SyndicateSonya Posmentier's Cultivation and Catastrophe feels urgent and contemporary even as its turn to black lyric asks readers to pause, sound out, and reflect on a long history of poetic engagement with ecological catastrophe, forced migration, and the afterlife of the plantation.—Britt Rusert, University of Massachusetts Amherst, SyndicateThere is much to admire in this wide-ranging and carefully researched study. In particular, its close attention to poetic form represents a valuable contribution to postcolonial ecocriticism, which has tended to focus more on narrative genres.—Review of English StudiesPosmentier's monograph is a much-needed contribution to both the new lyric studies and ecopoetics, two fields that, until recently, have focused more often than not on the writings and methods of white European and American poets and critics.—Contemporary LiteratureThe capaciousness with which Posmentier approaches the lyric is generative, especially in light of environmental criticism's recent wave of poetry scholarship . . . groundbreaking.—Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and EnvironmentTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPART 11. Cultivating the New Negro2. Cultivating the Nation3. Cultivating the CaribbeanPART 24. Continuing CatastropheCollecting Catastrophe5. Collecting Culture6. Unnatural CatastropheNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisThe first study of modern and contemporary poetry's vibrant exchange with gossip. Can the art of gossip help us to better understand modern and contemporary poetry? Gossip's ostensible frivolity may seem at odds with common conceptions of poetry as serious, solitary expression. But in Word of Mouth, Chad Bennett explores the dynamic relationship between gossip and American poetry, uncovering the unexpected ways that the history of the modern lyric intertwines with histories of sexuality in the twentieth century. Through nuanced readings of Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Frank O'Hara, and James Merrillpoets who famously absorbed and adapted the loose talk that swirled about them and their workBennett demonstrates how gossip became a vehicle for alternative modes of poetic practice. By attending to gossip's key role in modern and contemporary poetry, he recognizes the unpredictable ways that conventional understandings of the modern lyric poem have been shaped by, and afforded a uniqTrade ReviewIn a deeply researched discussion of poetic, queer, and rhetorical theory, Bennett argues that "ideas of lyric, gossip, and queerness" reveal "new and illuminating contexts" (3).—ChoiceChad Bennett's Word of Mouth: Gossip and American Poetry is so careful and decorous, it is beyond reproach. The writing is groomed, the research meticulous, the choice of subjectsGertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Frank O'Hara, James Merrillstrikingly diverse. By patiently unpacking a crowd of difficult poems, Bennett shows how twentieth-century poetries have used gossip as mode to expand the formal and rhetorical possibilities of lyric.—Christopher Schmidt, City University of New York, Contemporary LiteratureChad Bennett's intuition that gossip is not inconsequential but central to poetry and that both gossip and poetry are eccentrically central to life, marks an ironic, mature, and observant mind. . . . His rhetoric is unaggressive, but his point is provocative. The point is that although not all gossip is queer, there is something potentially queer about gossip itself.—Andrew DuBois, University of Toronto, American Literary HistoryTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. “They Will Tell Well”2. “Ain’t You Heard?”3. “The Dish That’s Art”4. “The Celestial Salon”CodaNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisA critical reexamination of Russian modernist cultural historiography. Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures by the Modern Language AssociationThe writing and teaching of Russian literary and cultural history have changed little since the 1980s. In Search of Russian Modernism challenges the basic premises of Russian modernist studies, removing the aura of certainty surrounding the analytical tools at our disposal and suggesting audacious alternatives to the conventional ways of thinking and speaking about Russian and transnational modernism. Drawing on methodological breakthroughs in Anglo-American new modernist studies, Leonid Livak explores Russian and transnational modernism as a story of a self-identified and self-conscious interpretive community that bestows a range of meanings on human experience. Livak's approach opens modernist studies to integrative and interdisciplinary analysis, including the extension of scholarly inTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Note on Translation and Transliteration Introduction. Modernism as a Culture Chapter 1. The Toponymical Labyrinth of Russian Modernist Culture Chapter 2. The Errant Compass Rose of Russian Modernist StudiesChapter 3. Russian Modernism in Time and SpaceChapter 4. Navigating Russia’s Cultures of ModernityChapter 5. Russian Modernism in the Cultural MarketConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisA new view of the way modernist fiction writers tried to solve the problem of time.Do our fictions transform time? Do they cultivate the temporal environment? Such was the hopeor the fantasyat work in many modernist novels for which time was not only the major subject but also an object of reparative aspiration. Aimed at a kind of stewardship of time, these fictions constitute a practice of modernist time ecology: an effort to restore those landscapes of time that have been thrown into crisis by modernity. In Modernist Time Ecology, Jesse Matz redefines temporal experimentation in central writers like Proust, Mann, Woolf, Ellison, and Cather, who developed literary forms to cultivate, restore, and enrich the temporal environment. He brings fresh attention to others who best exemplify this ecological motive, arguing that E. M. Forster, J. B. Priestley, and V. S. Naipaul are leading figures in this practice of temporal redress. Matz also reveals how contempTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction Chapter One. The Art of Time, Theory to Practice Chapter Two. Modernist Time EcologyChapter Three. Bergson, Bakhtin, and the Ecological Chronotope Chapter Four. Timescapes of Modernist FictionChapter Five. Maurice in TimeChapter Six. J. B. Priestley in the Theater of TimeChapter Seven. Naipaul's Changing TimesChapter Eight. Time Ecology TodayChapter Nine. Film-Time EcologyChapter Ten. The Queer Prospect ConclusionNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisZukofsky, Oppen, and Niedecker wrote with a diversity of formal strategies but a singularity of purpose: the crafting of an anticapitalist poetics. Inaugurated in 1931 by Louis Zukofsky, Objectivist poetry gave expression to the complex contours of culture and politics in America during the Great Depression. This study of Zukofsky and two others in the Objectivist constellation, George Oppen and Lorine Niedecker, elaborates the dialectic between the formal experimental features of their poetry and their progressive commitments to the radical potentials of modernity. Mixing textual analysis, archival research, and historiography, Ruth Jennison shows how Zukofsky, Oppen, and Niedecker braided their experiences as working-class Jews, political activists, and feminists into radical, canon-challenging poetic forms. Using the tools of critical geography, Jennison offers an account of the relationship between the uneven spatial landscapes of capitalism in crisis and the Objectivists' paraTrade ReviewAn illuminating, insightful, and theoretically rigorous engagement with Objectivist poetics that is sure to shape subsequent discussion.—Review of English StudiesJennison embraces a precise critical vocabulary that serves her purpose well. . . Most importantly, [she] presents an incisive and rigorous reading of Zukovsky's early work, not against his own interpretive choices but informed by them.—Journal of American CultureThe signal theoretical work of the year is Ruth Jennison's The Zukofsky Era . . . It seems unlikely that work on both [Zukofsky and Oppen] in the coming years will be able to avoid responding to Jennison's reconfiguration of the critical terrain—this is a work sure to have a wide influence.—American LiteratureJennison delivers the most satisfying and intellectually robust explanation we have yet had of Zukofsky, in particular, and Objectivism, in general. No account of modernist poetics should be able to present itself without embarrassment if it avoids Jennison's readings. Along with Moretti and Eagleton, The Zukofsky Era shows that large-scale historical accounts can deliver complex textual readings. More please.—The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural TheoryTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart I: The Uneven Poetics of Radical ParataxisChapter 1. Zukofsky: The Political Economy of Revolutionary ModernismChapter 2. G. Oppen, Materialiste: Cinematic CapitalismPart II: The Commodity's InscapeChapter 3. Zukofsky: The Voice of the FetishChapter 4. Niedecker: The Interior Voice CommodifiedPart III: The Objectivist ReflexChapter 5. Zukofsky: Counterfetishistic LiteracyAppendixNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisRestoring proto-modernist little magazinesknown as ephemeral bibelotsto the scholarly canon. Emanating from the cabarets of modernist Paris, a short-lived vogue spread around the world for avant-garde journals known in English as ephemeral bibelots. For a time, it seemed that all the young bohemians passing through Paris started their own bibelots modeled on Le Chat Noir, the esoteric magazine of the famed Montmartre cabaret. These journals were recognizable for their decadence, campy queerness, astounding art nouveau illustrations, fin-de-siècle color schemes, innovative typefaces, and practiced bohemianism. In Ephemeral Bibelots, Brad Evans relays the untold story of this late-nineteenth-century craze for bibelots, dusting off a trove of periodicals largely untouched by digitization. In excavating this forgotten archive, Evans calls into question the prehistory of modernist little magazines as well as the history of American art and literature at the turn of the twentieth century. Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Prologue. The Black Cat Goes Walking Introduction. The Ephemeral Bibelots Chapter One. Gelett Burgess and the Flight from Reality Chapter Two. What Travels? What Doesn't? The International Movement of Movements Chapter Three. Relating in Henry James Chapter Four. Butterflies, Faddishness, and the Iconography of Desire Chapter Five. The Edginess of Stephen Crane at the End of the Relational Era Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisRestoring proto-modernist little magazinesknown as ephemeral bibelotsto the scholarly canon. Emanating from the cabarets of modernist Paris, a short-lived vogue spread around the world for avant-garde journals known in English as ephemeral bibelots. For a time, it seemed that all the young bohemians passing through Paris started their own bibelots modeled on Le Chat Noir, the esoteric magazine of the famed Montmartre cabaret. These journals were recognizable for their decadence, campy queerness, astounding art nouveau illustrations, fin-de-siècle color schemes, innovative typefaces, and practiced bohemianism. In Ephemeral Bibelots, Brad Evans relays the untold story of this late-nineteenth-century craze for bibelots, dusting off a trove of periodicals largely untouched by digitization. In excavating this forgotten archive, Evans calls into question the prehistory of modernist little magazines as well as the history of American art and literature at the turn of the twentieth century. Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Prologue. The Black Cat Goes Walking Introduction. The Ephemeral Bibelots Chapter One. Gelett Burgess and the Flight from Reality Chapter Two. What Travels? What Doesn't? The International Movement of Movements Chapter Three. Relating in Henry James Chapter Four. Butterflies, Faddishness, and the Iconography of Desire Chapter Five. The Edginess of Stephen Crane at the End of the Relational Era Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisTable of ContentsPrefaceAcknowledgments1. Experimental2. Flash3. Objectivity4. Precision5. ContactCoda. Future TextsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisOriginally published in 1979. Sylvia Plath is one of the most controversial poets of our time. For some readers, she is the symbol of women oppressed. For others, she is the triumphant victim of her own intensitythe poet pursuing sensation to the ultimate uncertainty, death. For still others, she is a doomed innocent whose sensibilities were too acute for the coarseness of our world. The new essays of this edited collection (with a single exception, all were written for this book) broaden the perspective of Plath criticism by going beyond the images of Plath as a cult figure to discuss Plath the poet. The contributorsamong them Calvin Bedient, Hugh Kenner, J. D. O'Hara, and Marjorie Perloffdraw on material that most previous commentators lacked: a substantial body of Plath's poetry and prose, a moderately detailed biographical record, and an important selection of the poet's correspondence. The result is an important and provocative volume, one in which major critics offer an abundancTable of ContentsIntroduction Chapter 1. Achievement and valueChapter 2. Process and influenceChapter 3. Personal and public contextsSylvia Plath: a selected bibliography of primary and secondary materials Contributors Index of Sylvia Plath's works General Index

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewThe black optimism that animates Posmentier's writing is also a prominent feature of the poems, songs, and works of visual art that she takes up as her primary objects of concern. Yet there is also, alongside this optimism, the ever-present specter of the end of the world—one that operates, always, right alongside the countless new worlds that black art necessarily engenders—which demands our attention.—SyndicateSonya Posmentier's Cultivation and Catastrophe feels urgent and contemporary even as its turn to black lyric asks readers to pause, sound out, and reflect on a long history of poetic engagement with ecological catastrophe, forced migration, and the afterlife of the plantation.—Britt Rusert, University of Massachusetts Amherst, SyndicateThere is much to admire in this wide-ranging and carefully researched study. In particular, its close attention to poetic form represents a valuable contribution to postcolonial ecocriticism, which has tended to focus more on narrative genres.—Review of English StudiesPosmentier's monograph is a much-needed contribution to both the new lyric studies and ecopoetics, two fields that, until recently, have focused more often than not on the writings and methods of white European and American poets and critics.—Contemporary LiteratureThe capaciousness with which Posmentier approaches the lyric is generative, especially in light of environmental criticism's recent wave of poetry scholarship . . . groundbreaking.—Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and EnvironmentTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPART 11. Cultivating the New Negro2. Cultivating the Nation3. Cultivating the CaribbeanPART 24. Continuing CatastropheCollecting Catastrophe5. Collecting Culture6. Unnatural CatastropheNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisA polemical reaction against a trend in global modernist studies which still privileges European and Anglophone texts. Existing studies of literary modernism generally read Anglophone Atlantic texts through the lens of critical theories emanating from Europe and North America. In Modernism after Postcolonialism, Mara de Gennaro undertakes a comparative Anglophone-Francophone study, invoking theoretical frameworks from Gayatri Spivak, Édouard Glissant, Françoise Vergès, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and others. Examining transnational poetics of comparison that contest the comparative practices of colonialist, racist, and ethno-nationalist discourses, the book treats these poetics as models for a creolist critical method of reading, one that searches out unpredictable, mutually generative textual relations obscured by geographic and linguistic divides. In each chapter, de Gennaro pairs a canonical English-language modernist writer (Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, E. M. ForsTrade ReviewMara de Gennaro's study is ambitious and impressive. It pursues a rich variety of ideas, it chooses texts for reasons familiar to modernist and postcolonial scholars but pairs them in surprising ways, and its innovative close readings justify these pairings.—Jesse Wolfe, California State University, Comparative Literature StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. Anxious Mastery and the Forms It TakesChapter 1. Troubling Classifications: Unspeakable Figures of Métissage in "Melanctha" and DisgraceChapter 2. Troubling Sovereignties: Intimations of Relation in The Waste Land and Cahier d'un retour au pays natalChapter 3. Traversing Bounds of Historical Memory: Dethroning the Narrator and Creolizing Testimony in A Passage to India and Texaco Chapter 4. Traversing Bounds of Solidarity: Poor Analogies and Painful Negotiations in Three Guineas and The Farming of BonesConclusion. The Beauty of a Trembling WorldNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA polemical reaction against a trend in global modernist studies which still privileges European and Anglophone texts. Existing studies of literary modernism generally read Anglophone Atlantic texts through the lens of critical theories emanating from Europe and North America. In Modernism after Postcolonialism, Mara de Gennaro undertakes a comparative Anglophone-Francophone study, invoking theoretical frameworks from Gayatri Spivak, Édouard Glissant, Françoise Vergès, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and others. Examining transnational poetics of comparison that contest the comparative practices of colonialist, racist, and ethno-nationalist discourses, the book treats these poetics as models for a creolist critical method of reading, one that searches out unpredictable, mutually generative textual relations obscured by geographic and linguistic divides. In each chapter, de Gennaro pairs a canonical English-language modernist writer (Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, E. M. ForsTrade ReviewMara de Gennaro's study is ambitious and impressive. It pursues a rich variety of ideas, it chooses texts for reasons familiar to modernist and postcolonial scholars but pairs them in surprising ways, and its innovative close readings justify these pairings.—Jesse Wolfe, California State University, Comparative Literature StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. Anxious Mastery and the Forms It TakesChapter 1. Troubling Classifications: Unspeakable Figures of Métissage in "Melanctha" and DisgraceChapter 2. Troubling Sovereignties: Intimations of Relation in The Waste Land and Cahier d'un retour au pays natalChapter 3. Traversing Bounds of Historical Memory: Dethroning the Narrator and Creolizing Testimony in A Passage to India and Texaco Chapter 4. Traversing Bounds of Solidarity: Poor Analogies and Painful Negotiations in Three Guineas and The Farming of BonesConclusion. The Beauty of a Trembling WorldNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisDespite meter's recasting as a rigid metronome, diverse modern poet-critics refused the formal ideologies of free verse through complex engagements with traditional versification. In the twentieth century, meter became an object of disdain, reimagined as an automated metronome to be transcended by new rhythmic practices of free verse. Yet meter remained in the archives, poems, letters, and pedagogy of modern poets and critics. In Modernism's Metronome, Ben Glaser revisits early twentieth-century poetics to uncover a wide range of metrical practice and theory, upending our inherited story about the breaking of meter and rise of free verse.Trade ReviewModernism's Metronome is an extremely learned book.—Scarlett Higgins, University of New Mexico, American Literary ReviewTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter 1. Modernist Scansion: Robert Frost's Distorted VernacularChapter 2. Penty Ladies: T. S. Eliot, Satire, and the Gender of Modern MeterChapter 3. "No Feet to Walk On": Pound's Late Victorian ProsodyChapter 4. Metristes: Formal Feeling in Sara Teasdale, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Louise BoganChapter 5. The Prosody of Passing: Jean Toomer and James Weldon JohnsonChapter 6. Folk Iambics: Sterling Brown's Outline for the Study of the Poetry of American NegroesConclusion. Prosody after FormAppendix. Scansion and Metrical NotationNotesWorks CitedIndex

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Book SynopsisDespite meter's recasting as a rigid metronome, diverse modern poet-critics refused the formal ideologies of free verse through complex engagements with traditional versification. In the twentieth century, meter became an object of disdain, reimagined as an automated metronome to be transcended by new rhythmic practices of free verse. Yet meter remained in the archives, poems, letters, and pedagogy of modern poets and critics. In Modernism's Metronome, Ben Glaser revisits early twentieth-century poetics to uncover a wide range of metrical practice and theory, upending our inherited story about the breaking of meter and rise of free verse.Trade ReviewModernism's Metronome is an extremely learned book.—Scarlett Higgins, University of New Mexico, American Literary ReviewTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter 1. Modernist Scansion: Robert Frost's Distorted VernacularChapter 2. Penty Ladies: T. S. Eliot, Satire, and the Gender of Modern MeterChapter 3. "No Feet to Walk On": Pound's Late Victorian ProsodyChapter 4. Metristes: Formal Feeling in Sara Teasdale, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Louise BoganChapter 5. The Prosody of Passing: Jean Toomer and James Weldon JohnsonChapter 6. Folk Iambics: Sterling Brown's Outline for the Study of the Poetry of American NegroesConclusion. Prosody after FormAppendix. Scansion and Metrical NotationNotesWorks CitedIndex

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Book SynopsisWhat might behaviorism, that debunked school of psychology, tell us about literature?If inanimate objects such as novels or poems have no mental properties of their own, then why do we talk about them as if they do? Why do we perceive the minds of characters, narrators, and speakers as if they were comparable to our own? In Behaviorism, Consciousness, and the Literary Mind, Joshua Gang offers a radical new approach to these questions, which are among the most challenging philosophical problems faced by literary study today. Recent cognitive criticism has tried to answer these questions by looking for similarities and analogies between literary form and the processes of the brain. In contrast, Gang turns to one of the twentieth century's most infamous psychological doctrines: behaviorism. Beginning in 1913, a range of psychologists and philosophersincluding John B. Watson, B. F. Skinner, and Gilbert Ryleargued that many of the things we talk about as mental phenomena aren't at all intTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. Literary Experience and the Concept of Mind1. Behaviorism and the Beginnings of Close Reading2. Inner Sights3. Mental Acts4. The Form of ThoughtCoda. Observations and/or ReflectionsNotesWorks CitedIndex

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Book SynopsisA fascinating study of how behavioral science shaped twentieth-century politics and the modernist literary period. The advent of the twentieth century famously brought about new personal and political freedoms, including radical changes in voting rights and expressions of gender and sexuality. Yet writers and cultural critics shared a sense that modern life reduced citizens to automatons capable of interacting with the world in only the most reflexive ways. In Automatic, Timothy Wientzen asks why modernists were deeply anxious about the role of reflexive behaviorsand the susceptibility of bodies to physical stimuliin the new political structures of the twentieth century. Engaging with historical thinking about human behaviors that fundamentally changed the nature of political and literary practice, Wientzen demonstrates the ways in which a politics of reflex came to shape the intellectual and cultural life of the modernist era. Documenting some of the ways that modernist writers and Table of ContentsIntroduction: Prescribed Tracks1. Prescribed Tracks: Modernism, Modernity, and the Human Automaton2. Vibrant Bodies, Automatic Minds: Vitalism, D. H. Lawrence, and the Politics of Spontaneity3. Public Reflex: Wyndham Lewis, Public Relations, and the Invisible Government4. Pavlovian Nationalism: Rebecca West's Reflex Communities5. Higher Degrees of Automaticity: Habitus, Samuel Beckett, and Late ModernismAfterword: Choice Architects, Where Is Your Vortex? The Politics of Reflex in the Twenty-First CenturyWorks CitedNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA revisionist history of American liberalism, from the Great Depression to the Cold War. Finalist of the MSA First Book Prize by The Modernist Studies AssociationIn Making Liberalism New, Ian Afflerbach traces the rise, revision, and fall of a modern liberalism in the United States, establishing this intellectual culture as distinct from classical predecessors as well as the neoliberalism that came to power by century's end. Drawing on a diverse archive that includes political philosophy, legal texts, studies of moral psychology, government propaganda, and presidential campaign materials, Afflerbach also delves into works by Tess Slesinger, Richard Wright, James Agee, John Dewey, Lionel Trilling, and Vladimir Nabokov. Throughout the book, he shows how a reciprocal pattern of influence between modernist literature and liberal intellectuals helped drive the remarkable writing and rewriting of this keyword in American political life. From the 1930s into the 1960s, Afflerbach writes, modTable of ContentsPreface: What We Talk about When We Talk about LiberalismIntroduction: Making Liberalism NewPart 1: A Liberal Modernism1. Liberalism Incorporated: Intellectuals, Abortion, and the Critique of Possessive Individualism2. Racial Liberalism: Native Son and the Problem of "Color-Blind" LawPart 2: A Modern Liberalism3. The Inward Turn: Tragedy, Documentary, and the Making of the Postwar Liberal Imagination4. Ending in Style: JFK, Nabokov, and the Triumph of a Liberal AestheticConclusion: What's Left of Liberalism? (Or: What's So New about Neoliberalism?)Works CitedNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA revisionist history of American liberalism, from the Great Depression to the Cold War. Finalist of the MSA First Book Prize by The Modernist Studies AssociationIn Making Liberalism New, Ian Afflerbach traces the rise, revision, and fall of a modern liberalism in the United States, establishing this intellectual culture as distinct from classical predecessors as well as the neoliberalism that came to power by century's end. Drawing on a diverse archive that includes political philosophy, legal texts, studies of moral psychology, government propaganda, and presidential campaign materials, Afflerbach also delves into works by Tess Slesinger, Richard Wright, James Agee, John Dewey, Lionel Trilling, and Vladimir Nabokov. Throughout the book, he shows how a reciprocal pattern of influence between modernist literature and liberal intellectuals helped drive the remarkable writing and rewriting of this keyword in American political life. From the 1930s into the 1960s, Afflerbach writes, modTable of ContentsPreface: What We Talk about When We Talk about LiberalismIntroduction: Making Liberalism NewPart 1: A Liberal Modernism1. Liberalism Incorporated: Intellectuals, Abortion, and the Critique of Possessive Individualism2. Racial Liberalism: Native Son and the Problem of "Color-Blind" LawPart 2: A Modern Liberalism3. The Inward Turn: Tragedy, Documentary, and the Making of the Postwar Liberal Imagination4. Ending in Style: JFK, Nabokov, and the Triumph of a Liberal AestheticConclusion: What's Left of Liberalism? (Or: What's So New about Neoliberalism?)Works CitedNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Apprentice Alone in His Workshop: The Inventions Notebook1. Indebted and Well-Bred: Literary Models and Authority in the Juvenilia2. The Notebook, Begun: The Clash of Laforgue and Baudelaire in the Poems of November 19093. Clearing the Throat: The Poems of Early 19104. Raising the Voice: The Sequence Poems of Fall 19105. Trembling with Pathos: The Paris Poems of Late 1910 and Early 19116. The Short and Surprisingly Private Life of King Bolo: The Bawdy Poems and Their Audiences7. "Prufrock," Abandoned: How the Poem Was Written, How It Was Received, and How It Works8. Mumbling the Denouement: The Last and Undated Poems of the Notebook, late 1911-1915NotesWork CitedIndex

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Book SynopsisHow did an ordinary, if intelligent, boy who wrote unremarkable poems becomewith no help, and in record timethe author of one of the most significant and beloved poems of the twentieth century?T. S. Eliot's juvenilia show little inclination to question the social, cultural, religious, or domestic values he had inherited. How did a young man who wrote uninspired doggerel about wilting flowers transform himselfin a mere twenty monthsinto the author of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock? In Becoming T. S. Eliot, Jayme Stayerpraised by Christopher Ricks as a scholar who is scrupulous in acknowledging the contingencies that will always preclude perfectionexplains this staggering accomplishment by tracing Eliot's artistic and intellectual development. Relying on archival research and original analysis, this is the first book dedicated entirely to Inventions of the March Hare, Eliot's youthful notebook, which was once thought lost but was rediscovered after Eliot's death. Stayer places EliotTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Apprentice Alone in His Workshop: The Inventions Notebook1. Indebted and Well-Bred: Literary Models and Authority in the Juvenilia2. The Notebook, Begun: The Clash of Laforgue and Baudelaire in the Poems of November 19093. Clearing the Throat: The Poems of Early 19104. Raising the Voice: The Sequence Poems of Fall 19105. Trembling with Pathos: The Paris Poems of Late 1910 and Early 19116. The Short and Surprisingly Private Life of King Bolo: The Bawdy Poems and Their Audiences7. "Prufrock," Abandoned: How the Poem Was Written, How It Was Received, and How It Works8. Mumbling the Denouement: The Last and Undated Poems of the Notebook, late 1911-1915NotesWork CitedIndex

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Book SynopsisModernist literature at the end of the British empire challenges conventional notions of homeland, heritage, and community. Finalist of the MSA First Book Prize by The Modernist Studies AssociationThe waning British empire left behind an abundance of material relics and an inventory of feelings not easily relinquished. In The Obsolete Empire, Philip Tsang brings together an unusual constellation of writersHenry James, James Joyce, Doris Lessing, and V. S. Naipaulto trace an aesthetics of frustrated attachment that emerged in the wake of imperial decline. Caught between an expansive Britishness and an exclusive Englishness, these writers explored what it meant to belong to an empire that did not belong to them. Thanks to their voracious reading of English fiction and poetry in their formative years, all of these writers experienced a richly textured world with which they deeply identified but from which they felt excluded. The literary England they imagined, frozen in time and out oTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. The Peripheral Sense of an EndingChapter One. Henry James and the Perversity of EmpireChapter Two. James Joyce and the Negative CommunityChapter Three. Doris Lessing and Late RealismChapter Four. V. S. Naipaul and the Rhetoric of EnchantmentEpilogue. Time of the OtherNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA groundbreaking study on the vital role of baroque theater in shaping modernist philosophy, literature, and performance. Finalist for the Outstanding Book Award by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Honorable Mention for the Balakian Prize by the International Comparative Literature Association, Winner of the Helen Tartar Book Subvention Award by the American Comparative Literature Association, Finalist of the MSA First Book Prize by the Modernist Studies AssociationBaroque stylewith its emphasis on ostentation, adornment, and spectaclemight seem incompatible with the dominant forms of art since the Industrial Revolution, but between 1875 and 1935, European and American modernists connected to the theater became fascinated with it. In Baroque Modernity, Joseph Cermatori argues that the memory of seventeenth-century baroque stages helped produce new forms of theater, space, and experience around the turn of the twentieth century. In response, modern theater helped give Table of ContentsIllustrationsPrefaceAcknowledgmentsOn "Baroque"Introduction: Toward an Orphic ModernismChapter 1. Overcoming Ascetic Style: Nietzsche and the Transvaluation of the BaroqueChapter 2. The Matter of Spectacle: Mallarmé and the Futures of Theatrical OstentationChapter 3. Landscapes of Melancholy: Benjamin, Trauerspiel, and the Pathways of TraditionChapter 4. The Citability of Baroque Gesture: Unsettling SteinEpilogue: Glancing Back, Reaching ForwardNote on TranslationsNotesBibliography Index

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Book SynopsisA look at how West African and Caribbean Francophone writers use rhythm, music, and sound to create and negotiate identityTrade Review"Huntington’s emphasis on the interconnections of the related arts—music, poetry, fiction, oral tradition etc.—is one of the few to treat systematically, and in a sound, sophisticated theoretical and ethnographic framework, the important traits of African literary, oral and musical productions. Sounding Off will make a great contribution to the interdisciplinary study and thus provide a deeper understanding of musical and literary-artistic productions in African and diasporan communities." —Daniel Avorgbedor, Ohio State University, ColumbusTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction1. Rhythm and Transcultural Poetics Rhythm and Transculture Method2. Rhythm and Reappropriation in God’s Bits of Wood and The Suns of Independence Language and the Language of Music Rhythm and Reappropriation in the Novel Instrumentaliture at Work Rhythm and Transformation Ordinary and Extraordinary Rhythms3. Rhythm, Music, and Identity in L’appel des arènes and Ti Jean L’horizon Rhythm, Music, Subjectivity, and the Novel Rhythm and Identity in L’appel des arènes Rhythm and Identity in Ti Jean L’horizon Rethinking Rootedness4. Music and Mourning in Crossing the Mangrove and Solibo Magnificent Memory, Mourning, and Mosaic Identities Rhythm, Music, and Identity as Process The Sounds of Death and Mourning Configuring Rhythmic and Musically Mediated IdentitiesConcluding Remarks Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisAn introduction to the themes of a still-evolving American ethnic literatureTrade Review"Pelaud provides the first comprehensive introduction and overview of Vietnamese American literature, a largely ignored and under-studied area within the larger field of Asian American literature.... Throughout, Pelaud's writing is clear and her analysis sharp. This accessible book is a must read. Summing Up: Highly recommended."— ChoiceTable of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments IntroductionPart I: Inclusion1. History 2. Overview 3. HybridityPart II: Interpretation4. Survival 5. Hope and Despair 6. ReceptionConclusion Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisAn introduction to the themes of a still-evolving American ethnic literatureTrade Review"Pelaud provides the first comprehensive introduction and overview of Vietnamese American literature, a largely ignored and under-studied area within the larger field of Asian American literature.... Throughout, Pelaud's writing is clear and her analysis sharp. This accessible book is a must read. Summing Up: Highly recommended."— ChoiceTable of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments IntroductionPart I: Inclusion1. History 2. Overview 3. HybridityPart II: Interpretation4. Survival 5. Hope and Despair 6. ReceptionConclusion Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisExploring the fantastic in Spanish American literature as an expression of subversiveness that threatening to undermine the cultureTrade Review"Unraveling the Real offers a welcome update to the existing criticism on the genre and some useful speculation as to its future... [T]he literature covered is substantial, and all major critical perspectives are well represented. This is a highly readable and useful book for students, scholars, and others interested in the fantastic literature of Latin America." The Americas, October 2012 "Unraveling the Real is a very readable, succinct introduction to the topic of the fantastic and its primary critics. Duncan presents a review of the texts on the fantastic and applies this trace to individual authors and film directors, narrative strategies, psychological processes and gender issues. Her introduction is effective in establishing the borders and transgressions of the fantastic, and she is not afraid of moving from the literature of and on the fantastic to the questioning of cultural constructs. Her objective to emphasize the analysis of social criticism is an effective approach." Enrique Sacerio-Gari, Bryn Mawr CollegeTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. The Fantastic as a Literary Genre1 Modernist Short Stories and the Fantastic2 The Fantastic as an Interrogation of Literary Practices3 Reclaiming History: Fantastic Journeys in Time and Space4 Psychoanalytic Readings of the Fantastic5 The Fantastic and the Conventions of Gothic Romance6 Women Writers of the Fantastic7 Cinematic Encounters with the FantasticConclusion. Fantastic Literature in Spanish America in the Twenty-First CenturyNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisExploring the fantastic in Spanish American literature as an expression of subversiveness that threatening to undermine the cultureTrade Review"Unraveling the Real offers a welcome update to the existing criticism on the genre and some useful speculation as to its future... [T]he literature covered is substantial, and all major critical perspectives are well represented. This is a highly readable and useful book for students, scholars, and others interested in the fantastic literature of Latin America." The Americas, October 2012 "Unraveling the Real is a very readable, succinct introduction to the topic of the fantastic and its primary critics. Duncan presents a review of the texts on the fantastic and applies this trace to individual authors and film directors, narrative strategies, psychological processes and gender issues. Her introduction is effective in establishing the borders and transgressions of the fantastic, and she is not afraid of moving from the literature of and on the fantastic to the questioning of cultural constructs. Her objective to emphasize the analysis of social criticism is an effective approach." Enrique Sacerio-Gari, Bryn Mawr CollegeTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. The Fantastic as a Literary Genre1 Modernist Short Stories and the Fantastic2 The Fantastic as an Interrogation of Literary Practices3 Reclaiming History: Fantastic Journeys in Time and Space4 Psychoanalytic Readings of the Fantastic5 The Fantastic and the Conventions of Gothic Romance6 Women Writers of the Fantastic7 Cinematic Encounters with the FantasticConclusion. Fantastic Literature in Spanish America in the Twenty-First CenturyNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisAn argument, based in history, law, literature, and philosophy, for empathy as an integral part of decisions about who will be designated an enemy of the stateTrade Review"Constructing the Enemy is a fascinating book-nuanced and engaging-that weaves together legal theory, the realities of legal practice, historical vignettes, and literary analysis. Srikanth artfully straddles disciplines and adds important new insights. Her refined, subtly developed topic is quite timely, and her ideas about empathy/antipathy are both challenging and accessible." -Daniel Kanstroom, Boston CollegeTable of ContentsAcknowledgements 1. Introduction: The Landscape of Empathy 2. Literary Imagination and American Empathy 3. Deserving Empathy? Renouncing American Citizenship 4. Hierarchies of Horror, Levels of Abuse: Empathy for the Internees 5. Guantanamo: Where Lawyers Connect with the "Worst of the Worst" Conclusion

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Book SynopsisHow race, gender, and sexuality were re-imagined in the interwar encounters of Asians and AmericansTrade Review"Kuo's book is a distinctive and important contribution to Asian diaspora and Asian American cultural studies focusing on the first half of the twentieth century. Her analysis of historical figures and filmic and literary texts deepens the increasing transnational focus in Asian American studies and also overcomes some of the limitations of US-centered scholarship. At the same time, Kuo embeds her interpretations of iconic Japanese feminists and classic Asian American texts within American cultural, historical, and political contexts, illustrating the complex inter- and intranational discursive hegemony of that period." - MELUS, September 2nd 2013 "East Is West and West Is East is ostensibly about gender and race issues in the interwar period, but the intrigue of the book is Karen Kuo's insights into the development of American modernity. She argues persuasively that the United States used Asia as a 'proxy' for American crises of modernity by limiting Asians' ability to integrate into American society... [I]t provides enough to allow scholars to uncover new ways of thinking about American modernity. She takes a sophisticated approach by studying females and males and by looking at the views and interactions of Asians and Americans... innovative." - Journal of American History "Within American studies and its various branches, much of the scholarship about sexual and other kinds of interracial encounters focuses on white American anxiety. Karen Kuo broadens our purview considerably. Her wonderfully astute study finds that even during the period when the United States prohibited Asian immigration, there were literary and filmic texts by and in which white and Asian Americans anticipated greater freedoms through intimate relationships across historical racial boundaries... With scholarship like Kuo's, Asian American studies continues to broaden the field of Americanist inquiry. Kuo's focus on the ways in which the United States and Asia used each other as mirrors takes an important step." - Journal of Asian American Studies "[Kuo] provides an analysis of the complex transnational dynamics of gender, race, class, and sexuality in literature and film... [I]t is her illumination of these unresolved tensions and their importance that make this book a compelling piece of scholarship." - Pacific Historical Review, Feburary 2014Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1 How Yellow and White Women Are Sold: Controlling Chinese and White Female Sexuality and the Making of US Domesticity in East Is West 2 Masculine Racial Formations in Younghill Kang's East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee 3 Utopias Lost and Found: Lost Horizon and the Revitalization of American Masculinity 4 Envisioning Feminism across the Pacific: Japanese and American Feminism and the Limits of Race in Facing Two Ways Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThe role of cultural elites and journalists in promoting reading as a means of self-improvement and social mobilityTrade Review"This well-researched, thoughtful book adds substantially to our understanding of middlebrow culture. It also has much to teach us about the complexities and variabilities of reading as a social practice. Beautifully written and intellectually deft, Reading Up will interest everyone engaged in the study of American literature and its relationship the larger culture." -Janice Radway, Communication Studies, Northwestern University, and author of A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste and Middle-Class DesireTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Cultivating Taste in a Mass-Market World 1 Mr. Mabie Tells What to Read 2 The Compromise of Silas Lapham 3 James for the General Reader 4 Misreading The House of Mirth 5 The Comforts of Romanticism Epilogue: Reading Up into the Twenty-first Century Appendix A: The Mabie Canon Appendix B: "Novels Descriptive of American Life" (November 1908) Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisHow the Tiananmen Square protest and massacre haunts the work of writers in the Chinese diasporaTrade Review"This penetrating, well-theorized, lucid book is the first to ponder the global literary impact of 'Tiananmen,' now the generally accepted shorthand term for the 1989 Beijing democracy movement and the army massacre that ended it. Kong provides close readings of four Tiananmen-related works... Recommended."Choice, November 2012 "Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square examines from the perspective of diaspora theory works of Sinophone literature that relate directly or indirectly to the Tiananmen crackdown of 4 June 1989. The framework is intriguing, and takes to a higher level the theoretical conceptions of amnesia and memory and the complex relations of emigre writers to the Chinese homeland. The layered writing draws together various strands of diaspora theory and imparts new meanings to the construction of 'Chineseness'."--The China Journal "[E]xcellent... Kong's aim is to provide a solid introduction to a 'distinctly politicized Chinese literary diaspora' brought into being by Tiananmen... Kong illuminates the conflicting features of the literary diaspora that Tiananmen gave rise to: self-exoticization and melancholic repetition-compulsion on one side and a simultaneous critique of Chinese authoritarianism and global neoliberal capitalism on the other."--World Literature Today, November 2013Table of ContentsIntroduction Tiananmen in Diaspora and in Fiction; The Existentialist Square: Gao Xingjian's Taowang; Part 1 The Prize and the Polis; Part 2 Fleeing Tiananmen; II The Aporetic Square: Ha Jin's The Crazed; Part 1 The Scholar and the Student; Part 2 The Lost Square; III The Globalized Square: Annie Wang's Lili; Part 1 Female Hooligans and Global Capital; Part 2 Equivocal Transnationalism; IV The Biopolitical Square: Ma Jian's Beijing Coma; Part 1 Tiananmen Cannibals and Biopower; Part 2 Reclaiming Student Life and After; Conclusion The Square Comes Full Circle; Bibliography.

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Book SynopsisConsiders how these books both depict contemporary American-ness and contribute critically to public dialogue about national belonging.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments1 Asian American Women’s Popular Literature, Neoliberalism, and Cultural Citizenship2 Asian American Mother-Daughter Narrative and the Neoliberal American Dream of Transformative Femininity3 Romancing the Self and Negotiating Postfeminist Consumer Citizenship in Asian American Women’s Labor Lit4 Neoliberal Detective Work: Uncovering Cosmopolitan Corruption in the New Economy5 Food Writing and Transnational Belonging in Global Consumer Culture6 Conclusion: Crossing Over and Going PublicNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisConsiders how these books both depict contemporary American-ness and contribute critically to public dialogue about national belonging.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments1 Asian American Women’s Popular Literature, Neoliberalism, and Cultural Citizenship2 Asian American Mother-Daughter Narrative and the Neoliberal American Dream of Transformative Femininity3 Romancing the Self and Negotiating Postfeminist Consumer Citizenship in Asian American Women’s Labor Lit4 Neoliberal Detective Work: Uncovering Cosmopolitan Corruption in the New Economy5 Food Writing and Transnational Belonging in Global Consumer Culture6 Conclusion: Crossing Over and Going PublicNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisUnbought and Unbossed critically examines the ways black women writers in the 1970s and early 1980s deploy black female characters that transgress racial, gender, and especially sexual boundaries. Trimiko Melancon analyzes literary and cultural texts, including Toni Morrison's Sula and Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, in the socio-cultural and historical moments of their production. She shows how representations of black women in the American literary and cultural imagination diverge from stereotypes and constructions of whiteness, as well as constructions of female identity imposed by black nationalism. Drawing from black feminist and critical race theories, historical discourses on gender and sexuality, and literary criticism, Melancon explores the variety and complexity of black female identity. She illuminates how authors including Ann Allen Shockley, Alice Walker, and Gayl Jones engage issues of desire, intimacy, and independence to shed light on a more complex blacTrade Review"Trimiko Melancon offers beautiful and complex readings of novels by Toni Morrison, Ann Allen Shockley, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, and Gloria Naylor while effortlessly synthesizing a generation of scholarship on black sexuality. Unbought and Unbossed is a refreshingly innovative new work destined to become a classic." —Robert F. Reid-Pharr, author of Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual"Unbought and Unbossed is an interesting exploration of black female sexual politics and literary representations of black womanhood at the intersection of three political and aesthetic movements: black nationalism, (black) feminism, and postmodernism. I was especially impressed with Melancon’s close readings of the primary texts and her analysis of the symbolic sexual play and coming of age of the characters. This book is a welcome addition to the very few literary studies that deal explicitly with black womanhood and transgressive sexuality." —Eve Dunbar, Associate Professor of English at Vassar College and author of Black Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers between the Nation and the World"[A] critical analysis of five 'post-1960s black women’s texts.' ... Perhaps most provocatively, Melancon concentrates on the transgressive sexuality present in all of these books... and asserts its importance to the authors’ larger project.... [S]erious readers of African-American literature will value the innovative observations offered on the intersection of 'race, gender, and sexuality' in American life and letters." —Publishers Weekly"Unbought and Unbossed is an eloquently written and well-organized book about an important era in black women's literary tradition."—LaMonda Horton Stallings, Indiana University Bloomington, author of Mutha’ Is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female CultureTable of Contents Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Disrupting Dissemblance 1 “New World Black and New World Woman”: Or, Beyond the Classical Black Female Script 2 Toward an Aesthetic of Transgression: Ann Allen Shockley’s Loving Her and the Politics of Same-Gender Loving 3 Negotiating Cultural Politics 4 “That Way Lies Madness”: Sexuality, Violent Excess, and Perverse Desire 5 “Between a Rock and a Hard Place”: Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place Conclusion: “Without Fear of Reprisals”: Representation in the Age of Michelle Obama Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisDisabled Futures makes an important intervention in disability studies by taking an intersectional approach to race, gender, and disability. Milo Obourn reads disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, and critical race studies to develop a framework for addressing inequity. They theorize the concept of racialized disgenderto describe the ways in which racialization and gendering are social processes with disabling effectsthereby offering a new avenue for understanding race, gender, and disability as mutually constitutive. Obourn uses readings of literature and popular culture from Lost and Avatar to Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy to explore and unpack specific ways that race and gender constructand are constructed byhistorical notions of ability and disability, sickness and health, and successful recovery versus damaged lives. What emerges is not only a more complex and deeper understanding of the intersections between ableism, racism, and (cis)sexism, but also possibilit

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Book SynopsisThroughout her work, Octavia E. Butler explored, critiqued, and created religious ideology. Her prescient thoughts on the synergy between politics and religion in America are evident in her 1993 dystopian novel, Parable of the Sower, and its 1998 sequel, Parable of the Talents. They explored, respectively, what happens during a divisive cultural war that unjustly impacts the disenfranchised, and the rise of a fascistic president, allied with white fundamentalist Christianity, who chants the slogan, Make America Great Again.But religion, for Butler, need not be a restricting force. The editors of and contributors to God Is Change heighten our appreciation for the range and depth of Butler's thinking about spirituality and religion, as well as how Butler's workespecially the Parable and Xenogenesis seriesoffers resources for healing and community building. Essays consider the role of spirituality in Butler's canon and the themes of confronting trauma as well as experiencing transformatio

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Book SynopsisThroughout her work, Octavia E. Butler explored, critiqued, and created religious ideology. Her prescient thoughts on the synergy between politics and religion in America are evident in her 1993 dystopian novel, Parable of the Sower, and its 1998 sequel, Parable of the Talents. They explored, respectively, what happens during a divisive cultural war that unjustly impacts the disenfranchised, and the rise of a fascistic president, allied with white fundamentalist Christianity, who chants the slogan, Make America Great Again.But religion, for Butler, need not be a restricting force. The editors of and contributors to God Is Change heighten our appreciation for the range and depth of Butler's thinking about spirituality and religion, as well as how Butler's workespecially the Parable and Xenogenesis seriesoffers resources for healing and community building. Essays consider the role of spirituality in Butler's canon and the themes of confronting trauma as well as experiencing transformatio

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Book SynopsisCarol Shields and the Writer-Critic contributes to the scholarship on life writing and autobiography, literary criticism, and feminist and critical theory.Trade Review"Carol Shields and the Writer-Critic is an intelligent contribution to Shields scholarship, and a rewarding read for students and scholars alike." -- Gillian Roberts, University of Nottingham * Contemporary Women's Writing, 12:3, Nov 2018 *"…a valuable contemporary reappraisal, convincingly arguing that for Shields writing is a social and political act…" -- Carol Ann Howells, University of London/University of Reading * British Journal of Canadian Studies, vol 31 no 1 *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Shields as Writer-Critic: The Politics of Self-Representation and Autobiography Chapter One: The Problem of the Genre: The Autobiographical Pact in Small Ceremonies and The Box Garden Chapter Two: The Problem of the Author: Absence and the Epitaph of Victim in Swann Chapter Three: The Problem of the Body: Romance as Metaphysical Ruin in The Republic of Love Chapter Four: The Problem of the Subject: The Stone Diaries as Apocryphal Journal Chapter Five: The Problem of the Subject of Feminism: Unless as Meta-Autobiography Chapter Six: Conclusion

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Book SynopsisThe Politics and Poetics of Contemporary English Tragedy is a detailed study of the idea of the tragic in the political plays of David Hare, Howard Barker, Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill, Mark Ravenhill, Sarah Kane, and Jez Butterworth. Through an in-depth analysis of over sixty of their works, Sean Carney argues that their dramatic exploration of tragic experience is an integral part of their ongoing politics. This approach allows for a comprehensive rather than selective study of both the politics and poetics of their work.Carney’s attention to the tragic enables him to find a common discourse among the canonical English playwrights of an older generation and representatives of the nineties generation, challenging the idea that there is a sharp generational break between these groups. Finally, Carney demonstrates that tragic experience is often denied by the social discourse of Englishness, and that these playwrights make a crucial critical intervention by dramTrade Review'The study discusses a unique combination of English playwrights and their works and offers a valuable resource for academics, serious readers and theatergoers who appreciate contemporary English drama. Highly recommended.' -- J.S. Baggett Choice Magazine, vol 51:02:2013 'Sean Carney has written a study which every student and academic interested in contemporary English theatre, in political drama, and in the concept of tragedy has been waiting for... This will prove a valuable resource for students in Literature and Drama.' -- Anne Etienne New Theatre Quarterly vol30:02:2014 'Carney's account of these plays is patient and rigorous, and his delineation of tragedy as a postmodern category cogent...His study illuminates the powerful politics contained within a theatre of joy and despair.' -- Lily Cui Modern Drama vol 57:02:2014Modern Drama vol 57:02:2014 'This volume serves as a compelling intellectual history of the era, a detailed analysis of the work of the playwrights at its centre, and a crucial addition to the theory of both the transhistorical tragic and the place of tragedy in (post)modernity.' -- Ariel Watson Theatre Journal vol 67:01:2015Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction Chapter One David Hare: The Work of Mourning, or, The Agony and the Ecstasy of the Bourgeoisie The Year of Magical Thinking - Teeth 'n' Smiles - Plenty -- The Secret Rapture - Skylight - The Judas Kiss - Amy's View - My Zinc Bed - The Permanent Way -- The Vertical Hour - Gethsemane Chapter Two Howard Barker: Will and Desire - From the Tragedy of Socialism to the Ecstasy of the Unconscious Claw - Fair Slaughter - That Good Between Us -- The Power of the Dog - Victory - The Castle - The Europeans -- The Possibilities - Gertrude-The Cry - Dead Hands - The Seduction of Almighty God by the Boy Priest Loftus in the Abbey of Calcetto, 1539 Chapter Three Edward Bond: Tragedy and Postmodernity, or, The Promethean Impulse Saved - Lear - Bingo - The Fool -- Restoration -- The War Plays - Olly's Prison - At the Inland Sea - Coffee- The Crime of the Twenty-First Century - Chair Chapter Four Caryl Churchill: The Dionysian Mobius Strip Seven Jewish Children - Lovesick - Abortive -- Owners - Traps -- Light Shining in Buckinghamshire - Cloud Nine - Top Girls - Fen - A Mouthful of Birds -- Lives of the Great Poisoners - The Skriker - Thyestes --- Far Away -- A Number Chapter Five New English Tragedians: The Tragedy of the Tragic Mark Ravenhill: Shopping and Fucking - Faust is Dead - Handbag - Some Explicit Polaroids - Product - The Cut - pool (no water) - Sarah Kane: Blasted - Phaedra's Love - Cleansed - Crave - 4.48 Psychosis Conclusion: Late Modernism in Jerusalem Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisIn Post-Apocalyptic Culture, Teresa Heffernan poses the question: what is at stake in a world that no longer believes in the power of the end? Although popular discourse increasingly understands apocalypse as synonymous with catastrophe, historically, in both its religious and secular usage, apocalypse was intricately linked to the emergence of a better world, to revelation, and to disclosure.In this interdisciplinary study, Heffernan uses modernist and post-modernist novels as evidence of the diminished faith in the existence of an inherently meaningful end. Probing the cultural and historical reasons for this shift in the understanding of apocalypse, she also considers the political implications of living in a world that does not rely on revelation as an organizing principle.With fascinating readings of works by William Faulkner, Don DeLillo, Ford Madox Ford, Toni Morrison, E.M. Forster, Salman Rushdie, D.H. Lawrence, and Angela Carter, Post-Apocalyptic Trade Review"A useful starting point from which to examine the aesthetics of fiction being produced in the twenty-first century." ; -- Ivan Stacy Modern Language Review "Especially worthwhile for students of apocalypticism and also for students of twentieth-century fiction." -- Jesse Wolfe Kritikon Litterarum

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Book SynopsisFictions of Youth is a comprehensive examination of adolescence as an aesthetic, sociological, and ideological category in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s prose, poetry, and cinema. Simona Bondavalli’s book explores the multiple ways in which youth, real and imagined, shaped Pasolini’s poetics and critical positions and shows how Pasolini’s works became the basis for representations of contemporary young people, particularly Italians. From Pasolini’s own coming of age under Fascism in the 1940s to the consumer capitalism of the 1970s, youth stood for innocence, vitality, and rebellion. Pasolini’s representations of youth reflected and shaped those ideas.Offering a systematic treatment of youth and adolescence within Pasolini’s eclectic body of work, Fictions of Youth provides both a broad overview of the changing nature of youth within Italian modernity and an in-depth study of Pasolini’s significant contribution to thatTrade Review‘Bondavalli is to be congratulated for providing such a comprehensive, meticulously researched, and incisive contextual analysis of the treatment and significance of the category of youth in Pasolini’s oeuvre.’ -- Fabio Vighi * Modern Language Review vol 112:03:2017 *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Giovinezza, or The Best of Youth 2. Being Young: Bildung, Development, and Growing Up Ragazzi 3. Looking Back in Longing: Lost Youth, Teddy-Boys, and Il sogno di una cosa 4. Revolutionary Youth: From the Page, to the Streets, to the Screen 5. Fatherless Youth: Fathers, Children, Orphans 6. Giovani Infelici: Consumer, Disobedient, Unhappy Youth Epilogue: Coming of Age as Sadists: Salo and the Repudiation of Youth

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Book SynopsisBringing together top scholars in the field, Universality and Social Policy in Canada provides an overview of the universality principle in social welfare.Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction: Understanding Universality DANIEL BÉLAND, GREGORY P. MARCHILDON, AND MICHAEL J. PRINCE 1 Placing Universality in Canadian Social Policy and Politics MICHAEL J. PRINCE 2 Equalization and the Fiscal Foundation of Universality P.E. BRYDEN 3 The Single-Tier Universality of Canadian Medicare GREGORY P. MARCHILDON 4 Elementary and Secondary Education: The First Universal Social Program in Canada JENNIFER WALLNER AND GREGORY P. MARCHILDON 5 From Family Allowances to the Struggle for Universal Childcare in Canada RIANNE MAHON WITH MICHAEL J. PRINCE 6 Universality and the Erosion of Old Age Security DANIEL BÉLAND AND PATRIK MARIER 7 Common Differences: The Universalism of Disability and Unevenness of Public Policy MICHAEL J. PRINCE 8 Segmented Citizenship: Indigenous Peoples and the Limits of Universality MARTIN PAPILLON 9 Universality and Immigration: Differential Access to Social Programs and Societal Inclusion TRACY SMITH-CARRIER 10 Universality and Social Policy in the United Kingdom ALEX WADDAN AND DANIEL BÉLAND 11 Universal Social Policy in Sweden PAULA BLOMQVIST AND DANIEL BÉLAND Conclusion: Resiliencies, Paradoxes, and Lessons GREGORY P. MARCHILDON, DANIEL BÉLAND, AND MICHAEL J. PRINCE List of Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisAvant-Garde Canadian Literature offers an entrance into the vocabulary of the ongoing and primarily international debate surrounding the idea of avant-gardism, providing readers with a functional vocabulary for discussing some of the most hermetic and yet energetic literature ever produced in this country.Trade Review'This book greatly advances our understanding of the experimental lan of Canada's avant-garde throughout the century, and provides insight into collaborative authorship, radical networks, and surrealist and automatist writing and painting.' -- Irene Gammel The Journal of Canadian Studies, vol 50:01:2016 'Betts' weaving of past and present, theory and literary practice, aesthetics and politics is carried out in a brilliant way.' -- Alessandra Capperdoni Canadian Literature Autumn 2014 'A fascinating work of scholarship, the book is an affront to the persistent belief that Canadian literature of the early twentieth century is a dreary subject. Betts has shown that in fact it is hardly comprehended...Avant-Garde Canadian Literature is an admirable and welcome contribution to the history and interpretation of literature in this country.' -- Nicholas Bradley The Bull Calf: Reviews in Fiction, Poetry, and Literary Criticism December 2015Table of ContentsTable of Contents Introduction Chapter One: Theory of the Avant-Gardes in Canada Chapter Two: The Cosmic Canadians Chapter Three: Canadian Surrealism: The Automatists Chapter Four: Canadian Vorticism L'Envoi: The Future of the Avant Endnotes Works Cited Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisUnlikely friends and collaborators, Bernard Shaw and Gilbert Murray carried on a lively and wide-ranging correspondence for more than fifty years. When they began exchanging letters in the late 1890s, Shaw was a renowned Fabian propagandist, reviewer, and author of anti-conventional plays. Murray was a classicist and translator of ancient Greek drama who would eventually become Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford. Beginning with their shared distaste for the popular “well-made plays” of the era, their correspondence quickly expanded into collaboration – Murray helped revise Shaw’s Major Barbara, in which he appears as a character  – and discussion of a vast range of issues ranging from alphabet reform and psychic phenomena to the League of Nations and international politics.This collection of 171 letters, most never before published, finally makes the fascinating Shaw/Murray correspondence available. With explanatory headnotes and fTrade Review'Carpenter has done a superlative job compiling, contextualizing, and introducing the Shaw-Murray correspondence.' -- H.I. Einsohn Choice Magazine, vol 52:02:2015Table of ContentsGeneral Editor's Note Introduction Editor's Note Acknowledgements Abbreviations Letters Table of Correspondents References Index

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Book SynopsisThe first extended analysis of the relationship between Italian criminology and crime fiction in English, Methods of Murder examines works by major authors both popular, such as Gianrico Carofiglio, and canonical, such as Carlo Emilio Gadda.Many scholars have argued that detective fiction did not exist in Italy until 1929, and that the genre, which was considered largely Anglo-Saxon, was irrelevant on the Italian peninsula. By contrast, Past traces the roots of the twentieth-century literature and cinema of crime to two much earlier, diverging interpretations of the criminal: the bodiless figure of Cesare Beccaria’s Enlightenment-era On Crimes and Punishments, and the biological offender of Cesare Lombroso’s positivist Criminal Man.Through her examinations of these texts, Past demonstrates the links between literary, philosophical, and scientific constructions of the criminal, and provides the basis for an important reconceptualizTable of ContentsIntroduction Part One: Beccarian Introspection * Cesare Beccaria's Disembodied Criminal * Dark Ends for Leonardo Sciascia's Enlightened Detectives * Andrea Camilleri's Sicilian Simulacrum * Violence and the Law in Gianrico Carofiglio's Beccarian Courtroom Part Two: Lombrosian Vivisection * Cesare Lombroso Vivisects the Criminal * Carlo Emilio Gadda's Bodies of Evidence * Dario Argento's Aesthetics of Violence * Carlo Lucarelli's Lombrosian Nightmare Epilogue: Crime in the Twenty-First Century Bibliography Notes

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Book SynopsisThe emergence of cinema as a predominant form of mass entertainment in the 1910s inspired intellectuals to rethink their definitions of art. The Great Black Spider on Its Knock-Kneed Tripod traces the encounter of Italy’s writers with cinema, and in doing so offers vibrant new perspectives on the country’s early twentieth-century culture. This comparative study focuses on the immediate responses to this cultural phenomenon of three highly influential intellectuals, each with a competing aesthetic vision – Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder of Futurism; Gabriele D’Annunzio, leader of Italian Decadentism; and Luigi Pirandello, a father of modern European theatre and theorist of humour. Along with demonstrating how the popularization of the feature-length narrative influenced each author’s outlook and theories, Michael Syrimis unravels the extent to which cinema enforced or neutralized the ideological and aesthetic differences between them.Trade Review'Syrimis expresses sophisticated arguments in an elegant and straightforward style. His interdisciplinary scholarship contributes significantly to Italian Studies, but will also appeal to Cinema Studies as well as scholars interested in the intersection of technology and art in Italy.' -- Michael Edwards Modern Language Review vol 111:01:2016Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Illustrations Abbreviations Introduction: Reflections of Cinema and Technology in Marinetti, D'Annunzio, and Pirandello * Film Aesthetics of a Heroic Futurism * An Aesthetics of War: The (Un)Problematic Screening of Vita futurista * Velocita: Between Avant-Garde and Narrativity * Forse che si forse che no: Technological Inflections of a Decadent Text * Through a 'Futuristic' Lens: D'Annunzio's Cinematic Re-Visions * The Humoristic Image in Pirandello's Si gira * Cinema as Humour: The Ottre and the Superfluo Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThe Mirage of America in Contemporary Italian Literature and Film explores the use of images associated with the United States in Italian novels and films released between the 1980s and the 2000s. In this study, Barbara Alfano looks at the ways in which the individuals portrayed in these works – and the intellectuals who created them – confront the cultural construct of the American myth. As Alfano demonstrates, this myth is an integral part of Italians’ discourse to define themselves culturally – in essence, Italian intellectuals talk about America often for the purpose of talking about Italy.The book draws attention to the importance of Italian literature and film as explorations of an individual’s ethics, and to how these productions allow for functioning across cultures. It thus differentiates itself from other studies on the subject that aim at establishing the relevance and influence of American culture on Italian twentieth-centuryTrade Review'The Mirage of America is not only a valuable reading for academics but also an enriching experience for non-academics.' -- Serena Formica Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies - vol 4:1:2016Table of Contents*Acknowledgments*Introduction* The Vantage of the I: Prospecting in Perspective* The Ethics of the Subject* The Self and Italian Narrative* Matters of Space: "l'America sta qua." The Place of the New World in Italian literature* Scholarship and the History of the American Myth* Italian Modernism and America* The Left "I": A Close-up on the Italian Leftist Intellectual* Mapping the Journey *1 Wandering Subjects* The "I" at Wonder in Caro diario and Sogni mancini* The Moralizing "I" of Nanni Moretti*Caro diario: The Glue of Irony between Stupor and Stupidity* Identities in absentia in Sogni mancini*2 America Ubiqua* Displacing the Continent* The Site of City: A Global Explosion* The Ethical Space of City's Subjects*Non ci resta che piangere: The Counter-Enterprise*Lamerica*3 On a Trip to America: The "I" Travels* Setting Out for the Self*Treno di panna, A Train That Goes Nowhere* Baudrillard's Amerique and Giovanni's America: The Desert Explained and Exposed* Staging the Insignificant *4 American Arcadia* An "I" on Intellectual and Civil Engagement* Alter Ego: The Narrator* Et in Arcadia Ego* Love and Endings in Arcadia* Arcadia Responds *5 Historicizing the Dream: A Documented Eye on America* A New Perspective*Vita* The Dream of the Fathers*Nuovomondo* The American Dream and Globalization*Conclusion*Notes*Works Cited*Index of Names and Titles

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